Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by neonsunset 828 days ago
Small correction: FFI in Android land is abysmal, to get decent performance when accessing all kinds of system APIs you almost always end up having to write helpers in Java, to try to alleviate the pain of JNI as much as possible (it is still significant).

Interop with iOS OTOH is a breeze, some of the APIs may require newer Swift Library Evolution ABI (direct calls to Swift exprots, without going through C/objC) but .NET is getting it in .NET 9 (the first and only platform to have it at the moment of release).
1 comments
pron 828 days ago
Calling Android "Java" has always been a stretch. Not only has Android never been compatible with any version of Java, the divergence between Android and Java is only growing. JDK 22 is Java; Android is Android.
link
neonsunset 828 days ago
That is true, for all intents and purposes however the glue code to (insufficiently) reduce marshalling and FFI overhead is written in Java the language, even if it does not use OpenJDK.
link
pron 828 days ago
Okay, but we're not talking about OpenJDK but about Java, a specification -- not an implementation like the OpenJDK JDK -- that Android has never conformed to and from which it is only growing further apart. I.e. the OpenJDK JDK is an implementation of Java; Android is not (there certainly may be some Java code that happens to behave the same way on Android, but it is not, and has never been, the case for Java code generally). The relationship between Java and Android is similar to that between Linux and Unix -- lots of intended similarities, but there shouldn't be an expectation that a new Linux feature appears in, say, AIX or vice-versa.
link
pjmlp 828 days ago
At least they were forced to accept how much Android ecosystem depends on Java and now Java 17 LTS is the latest supported version, minus the stuff they never supported like Swing and Java 2D.
link
cxr 828 days ago
Calling Android Java is certainly a stretch, but aside from Sun/Oracle folks, I don't ever see anyone do that. Android is Android, Java is Java, and Android is written in Java.

If the language of the non-standard, deliberately ES262-incompatible NodeJS programming system (and GraalJS, for that matter) is called "JS" without anyone batting an eye—which it does—it's pretty silly to insist the language of Android isn't Java.

link