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There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it bas
by blasdel 17y ago
There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming)
That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'.
People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.
- davidw 17y ago> That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improvements with time; it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a JIT if/when they want.
- nwatson 17y agoFor low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.