Comment by pjmlp
6 months ago
Note that Google still doesn't have official support for using Rust in Android userspace, though.
Despite all pluses on the blog, NDK only supports C and C++ tooling, same on Android Studio, and it is up to the community to do the needful work, if anyone feels like using Rust instead.
Nobody's stopping you from using the NDK to compile Rust though. Android's ABI is just an ABI like any other. The system doesn't care if you built an .so using Rust or anything else so long as it plays by the rules.
Some people rather reach out for first party support, instead of filling in the gaps for the big boys.
By first party support, would you be expecting a Rust toolchain shipped in the NDK, or maybe Rust bindings shipped in the NDK?
I could see the latter, although I'd still question whether they should be special cased in terms of a Rust dependency compared to bindings being hosted on crates.io.
Or maybe they should ship scripts that shell out to an existing Rust toolchain.
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They've been trying to strangle the NDK for years. You can't even make an app without a ton of glue code on the JVM.
True, NDK was never intended to make apps, only for games and as helper for native methods, since it was introduced in Android 2.1.
The point is about the official support for using Rust exactly for the same use cases.