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> Can someone familiar with the Android ecosystem elaborate on what exactly this means? It means that Google is experimenting with using Rust to build parts of
by kllrnohj 7y ago
> Can someone familiar with the Android ecosystem elaborate on what exactly this means?
It means that Google is experimenting with using Rust to build parts of Android. That could mean parts of the OS, tests, tools, SDK, etc...
As a simple example of why this isn't necessarily super interesting is Python has been in the Android tree for ages, but just for some build & test stuff.
But maybe it's interesting just in that the Google engineers working on Android have started playing with Rust enough to bother checking it in to the tree.
- _bxg1 7y agoCool; so it's not an app development thing, it's an OS thing. Thanks for the explanation.
- libria 7y agoSomeone at Google should check in a Bitcoin hashcash library into the tree and watch HN go wild.
- swsieber 7y agoOne reason I find this interesting however is that fuchsia, a potential replacement for Android being worked on at google (that's an aggressive oversimplification) is partially written in Rust. So this potentially opens up using parts of fuchsia.
- panpanna 7y agoI think they want to experiment rewriting some libraries in Rust to avoid things like stagefright in future. Pretty much what Mozilla did when Rust got more serious.