> I was surprised to learn that Android in 2016 doesn't even natively come with an equivalent of JavascriptCore. You have the pleasure of somehow getting V8 to

> I was surprised to learn that Android in 2016 doesn't even natively come with an equivalent of JavascriptCore. You have the pleasure of somehow getting V8 to run and then serialize/deserialize all your native objects manually in order to talk to it if you want javascript outside the browser. That's a little bit like saying that Chez Panisse doesn't even deliver sewage to your table, and that if you want to pour it over your food you need to bring your own chamber pot with you. Java is not a great language to program in, but if there's any language it is clearly better than, then that language is JavaScript. Why would one want to program an Android app in JavaScript rather than in Java? There's only one reason to use JavaScript: because one is deploying in a browser, and JavaScript is the only language supported by the vast, vast majority of browsers. In every other way, it's a misbegotten mistake of a language.