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by pjmlp 3375 days ago
I always get the feeling that if the Android team got to choose the NDK would never been a thing, rather it was an upper management decision that they had to offer some kind of support for C and C++.

Even nowadays with Android N, the NDK is kind of WIP.
2 comments
TuringNYC 3375 days ago
We did Computer Vision work on Android before OpenCV ported to Android and the NDK was the only realistic way to achieve any real-time video/image analysis performance. Using the NDK was tedious and HR-expensive but we had no choice. So in that case, we were glad the NDK was an option.
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pjmlp 3375 days ago
I am also glad it is there, it is also where I spend most of my Android coding time.

My point is that the way Android team deals with NDK users seems like the NDK was imposed on the team, and they don't spend much developer time on it, looking from the set of open issues, outdated documentation where ndk-build is still used instead of cmake, integration with aar is still in progress, and set of available APIs.

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=NDK&so...

I cannot deny they have done lots of progress, but there seems not to be much interest in having a comparable experience to the Java tooling.

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richardwhiuk 3375 days ago
The NDK is essential for a large numbers of apps - including games and real time media applications.
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pjmlp 3375 days ago
Are you aware that it only got introduced in Android 2.2 right?

And that as I mentioned it still is a work-in-progress, 2nd class developer experience (down to forcing JNI calls to C++ libraries on the device like e.g. Skia), compared with the Java based tooling on the Android SDK.

It doesn't seem to get the love an essential tool is supposed to get.

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