On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:18 PM, fructose <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I would like to know what the definitive, hopefully official, > situation regarding native development. > that's easy, writing third-party apps containing native code is *officially* *not* *supported*. Which is our way to say that if you do it, don't be surprised if your app breaks due to system changes or have weird support issues. (Note that this is different if you are directly poking at the framework code to prepare a new Android-based system/product). > > Whenever anybody posts a question regarding native development the > stock answer that is given is "There is no support for native > development". > > I simply want to know the answers to: > 1) If I want to write/port a C/C++ application engine and write a Java > App that accesses it, how can this be achieved? > this is possible through clever hacks that won't be described here because these apps are very likely to break in one of the next release of the platform. > > 2) If this is not possible, will it be possible in the future? If so > when? > We are preparing a Native Development Kit that will allow you to embed native libraries in your application that your Java app will call through JNI. However there is a catch: the set of system interfaces your C/C++ code will be able to call will be very strictly limited (e.g. libc + libm + jni.h) Any attempt to call one of the system libraries like Skia, Webcore and other will fall under the *unsupported* case and *will* break in future releases of the system. The set of supported NDK native interfaces might gorw a little to include stuff like OpenGL in the more distant future, but will always remain very limited by design. That should be enough for many games and signal-processing apps. > > 3) Is this is not possible, is it only not possible for 3rd party > developers? If I am a hugh corporation, suppose I'm SAP or Oracle, or > a major international games developer and have multi-million selling > products in C/C++ that I wish to port to Android, are Google going to > tell me sorry its not possibe? Are they really going to say that? If > not then who do you talk to in order to open doors? > If you are a large corporation, just use the Android sources to build your own system and distribute them to your employees and/or customers. Of course you'll also do al the support. However, your native apps will probably not run properly on other Android-based systems. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
