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by shadowmint
3562 days ago
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If no one used it, they wouldn't be adding better support for it. The NDK is pervasively used by many many applications; that's why it's getting more support. For some reason this seems unpopular with the android team, who seem to keep trying to avoid the issue when ever its raised at I/O...but hey, clearly at least someone is paying attention to what the statistics are showing. Sure, it's some extra hoops to jump though; but shared business logic that you can use on any code base on any platform; that's a really really compelling reason to use the NDK, or one of the stacks based on it (eg. Xamarin, react native). It's not just for some edge case. The biggest players in the field are doing this. I think it's misrepresentative to try to characterize this as 'just for games'... |
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However the Android team, which is composed by quite a few ex-Sun Java team members, seems to not share the same love for C++ as Microsoft or the even their own Google clang team do.
While I appreciate the safety we get from Java as the Android main language, Symbian, iOS and WP all managed to have native sandboxes.
> I think it's misrepresentative to try to characterize this as 'just for games'...
I don't think so, because although we are able to use the NDK for coding apps, that is clearly not what the Android team wants to allow us to do, given the list of official APIs, which are all to game development related, even POSIX is only partially supported.
Now in Android N there are changes in place to prevent linking to platform libraries written in C or C++ like libpng and Skia.
It is ironic that we are forced to use JNI to make calls into those platform libraries via their Java bindings.
Also I don't believe that if Jetbrains hadn't decided CLion would be a worthy product, the Android team would have spent any effort to improve the life of NDK developers stranded with their decision to drop Eclipse CDT without any alternative.