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Really? That's disappointing. Good old bad old NDK strikes again. I really don't understand why Google doesn't seem interested in fixing it.

pjmlp 9y ago
They are fixing it, but NDK team seems to be a very small team, from the commits and gitHub issues. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/Roadmap.md https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/... You can already use clang 5.0 on the NDK, so even early C++17 support is possible. I don't know about TLS support. The NDK is only there for high performance graphics (vulkan), realtime áudio, SIMD and bringing native libraries from other platforms. So apparently their motivation is that devs should touch the NDK as little as possible.
- iainmerrick 9y ago
  Yeah, it just seems like they have the resources to support a bigger NDK team if they cared to do so. There plenty of apps that could really use a well-supported NDK. Games and audio apps for a start.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Google released ARCore last week. "ARCore works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal and focuses on three things:" https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/arcore-augmented-reality-at-android.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/arcore-aug... Which makes quite clear that even in AR, the role of the NDK is to support Java, Unity and Unreal applications, not to be used alone. I am fine with it, given the security issues with the native code so we should actually minimize its use, I just would like they would provide better tooling to call framework APIs instead of forcing everyone to write JNI wrappers by themselves.
    - iainmerrick 9y ago
      As a counter-example, they also just announced AAudio, and that's a C API: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio.html https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio... So they are still using C as a lingua franca for some low-level parts of the system. But without putting much effort into improving the C toolchain. I'm not very familiar with Unreal but I understand it's a C++ library, so it seems like that would benefit from a solid C++ toolchain too.

pjmlp 9y ago

They are fixing it, but NDK team seems to be a very small team, from the commits and gitHub issues. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/Roadmap.md https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/... You can already use clang 5.0 on the NDK, so even early C++17 support is possible. I don't know about TLS support. The NDK is only there for high performance graphics (vulkan), realtime áudio, SIMD and bringing native libraries from other platforms. So apparently their motivation is that devs should touch the NDK as little as possible.

iainmerrick 9y ago
Yeah, it just seems like they have the resources to support a bigger NDK team if they cared to do so. There plenty of apps that could really use a well-supported NDK. Games and audio apps for a start.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Google released ARCore last week. "ARCore works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal and focuses on three things:" https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/arcore-augmented-reality-at-android.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/arcore-aug... Which makes quite clear that even in AR, the role of the NDK is to support Java, Unity and Unreal applications, not to be used alone. I am fine with it, given the security issues with the native code so we should actually minimize its use, I just would like they would provide better tooling to call framework APIs instead of forcing everyone to write JNI wrappers by themselves.
  - iainmerrick 9y ago
    As a counter-example, they also just announced AAudio, and that's a C API: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio.html https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/aaudio/aaudio... So they are still using C as a lingua franca for some low-level parts of the system. But without putting much effort into improving the C toolchain. I'm not very familiar with Unreal but I understand it's a C++ library, so it seems like that would benefit from a solid C++ toolchain too.