On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 22:35:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 19:51:02 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 18:35:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I don't know, I think D really has a chance to do well on
mobile, but have other alternative languages, ie not
C/C++/java, done _that_ well on Android? I know the Rust
guys are now working on it, but while languages like
FreePascal are on there, I have not heard of any big success
story.
...
Native development in Android is a world of pain, given
Android's team stance on the NDK and poor tooling support.
You just have a tiny subset of APIs, the ones important for
game development, i.e. OpenGL, in memory framebuffers, sound,
hardware sensors and partial POSIX.
For everything else either you go JNI or have to bring third
party dependencies that increase the apk size.
It is ridiculous to the point there isn't access to the
SQLLite, SKIA and other C and C++ libraries from Android. One
is forced to integrate an own version.
Or Android Studio that still doesn't have a public roadmap
about C and C++ support parity to Eclipse ADT/CDT.
So NDK is only worthwhile for gaming or business code with the
UI written in Java.
Xamarin and Phonegap are the only success stories in the
traditional app market.
One has teams of developers creating platform wrappers and the
other just uses the browser via the web view, thus easier
platform integration.
I was playing around with Qt and gave up, as only the upcoming
5.4 will have UI controls with support for Android.
If you're not going to use the platform language, whether Java
or Obj-C, you have to expect some hurdles, especially if you're
going to try to shoehorn in a new language. D will have to
work into those app niches you mentioned first, but as stuff
like Qt becomes more viable on Android, official platform
support may not matter as much.
Agreed, but Android makes those hurdles worse because the team
doesn't believe in providing proper access to the NDK, whereas
Objective-C++ and C++/CX exist to ease the life of C++ developers
in iOS and WP, instead of JNI pain.
--
Paulo
