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by dragontamer 4519 days ago
With the rise of x86 Androids, is it really wise to start focusing on the NDK now?

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...

I assume the Samsung Galaxy 3 Tablet is a big "x86-Android" platform, which would obviously be incompatible with ARM-Android.

2 comments

As the other poster responded, NDK is not limited to ARM. NDK makes it (mostly) easy to write C++ and then compile it to multiple ISAs (x86, ARM and MIPS) and then ship all the binaries in the same APK. When the APK is installed and run on the device, the device automatically picks the appropriate binary files in the APK.

If you have some code optimized for a particular ISA, say a function which uses ARM NEON, you also have APIs in the NDK which allow you to detect which ISA you are running on and dynamically load the appropriate for that particular architecture. However, this is an optional feature. For pure C/C++ code without ASM or platform-specific intrinsics, compiling for multiple ISAs is trivial using the NDK tools.

You can ship multi-arch APK (with MIPS too).