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Comment by pjmlp

6 months ago

I expect Rust being documented here,

https://developer.android.com/ndk

I expect the whole Rust build process being part of Android Studio, including mixed language debugging between Java, Kotlin and Rust.

I expect all NDK APIs to have Rust bidding crates.

I expect that Android developer forums also care to support devs using Rust.

And anything else that I forgot to mentioned, that is provided for Java, Kotlin, C and C++.

17 comments

pjmlp

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flohofwoe  6 months ago

The Android NDK just barely supports C and C++ either, unless you're ok with 1990's tooling standards. The whole thing feels like it's maintained by two dudes locked in a Google basement somewhere. I doubt they have the capacity to deal with Rust support in the NDK, unless there's a big strategic change in Android tooling.

  • cogman10  6 months ago

    I'm not sure what you mean by this. Looking at a sample app [1] for the NDK, the tooling appears to be gradle and Cmake. Cmake isn't the newest of tools, but it's also not that dated.

    [1] https://github.com/android/ndk-samples/tree/main/endless-tun...

    • flohofwoe  6 months ago

      Both Gradle and CMake have a strong late 1990's smell to them. While CMake is sort of a necessary evil in the C/C++ world, there's no excuse for dragging Gradle into the NDK, combining both build tools leads to a complexity explosion that rarely works and tends to break after either the NDK or SDK is updated, or somebody merely looks the wrong way at the build files.

      3 replies →

  • pjmlp  6 months ago

    Nope it clearly supports ISO C 11 and ISO C++17.

    I do agree the NDK team is rather small.

  • quotemstr  6 months ago

    Huh? "Barely"? What are you talking about? The NDK supports compiling C++ just fine. There are CMake files, among other things, ready to use --- as well as Soong native configurations. CMake is under active development. Other toolkits are within easy reach: for example, Meson works fine. Also Bazel. Hell, even autotools can be made to work.

    • flohofwoe  6 months ago

      Sure, building C/C++ code into an .so file kinda works but that's about it, try building the APK entirely with cmake, that's simply not supported, you'll have to integrate with Gradle. The result is a complexity clusterf*ck that's a nightmare to maintain.

      The NDK team should take a long hard look at Emscripten to get some inspiration how native code development is integrated into a 'native-hostile' runtime platform.

      5 replies →