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The Android Open Source Project is awesome. It's not hard to compile it yourself and run it on a pixel 9. The issue is the hardware imo. (And some of the apps i

• nicoburns 10mo ago
  The userspace being tied to the JVM is a massive pain. Certainly it's a lot harder to bind to than any other OS's system libraries.
  • brabel 10mo ago
    How so?? JVM bytecode should be much easier to bind to, as the existence of JVM alternative runtimes for nearly every language shows.
    • nicoburns 10mo ago
      Unless you're using a language that's specifically compile-to-jvm (e.g. Java, Kotlin or similar), almost nobody is using those JVM alternative runtimes. They're usually second-class runtimes that don't run the entire ecosystem of the target langauge. React Native runs JavaScript in a separate JS VM, Flutter is compiling Dart to native code with emdedded runtime, and Rust UI code also compiles to a native binary. The "lingua franca" for language bindings is the C ABI which every other OS's platform libraries (Win32/Cocoa/GTK) support.
      • gf000 10mo ago
        > The "lingua franca" for language bindings is the C ABI which every other OS's platform libraries (Win32/Cocoa/GTK) support. Which is more like half of an API, it doesn't specify lifetimes so basically anything behind a pointer is unusable in itself. That's why we have "hacks" like gobjects and such, and why using most of the bindings is only possible if you have a decent binding library.