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Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

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21–30 of 157 posts

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#21
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tolerate Java and Kotlin, but the tooling is just awful *. I've stopped counting how many times I came back to an Android project after only a few months, only to have Android Studio force me to update Gradle and dependencies and whatnot, and break everything. * Of course one could blame me for not learning the ins and outs of the build system!

Same thing with XCode. I'd love a mobile app development pipeline that lets me never use either Android Studio or XCode. Let me drive everything with scripts and/or VSCode extensions.

If only Firefox OS had taken off...

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#23
post #22

Make? Jesus Christ people are still using that? It's like people don't realize that other languages have been created in the last 20 years

So which other actual alternative should we use for Android development besides Java and webapps.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#24
post #23
post #22

Make? Jesus Christ people are still using that? It's like people don't realize that other languages have been created in the last 20 years

So which other actual alternative should we use for Android development besides Java and webapps.

I am not a fan of Java, but going from Java to C is not an improvement.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#25
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tolerate Java and Kotlin, but the tooling is just awful *. I've stopped counting how many times I came back to an Android project after only a few months, only to have Android Studio force me to update Gradle and dependencies and whatnot, and break everything. * Of course one could blame me for not learning the ins and outs of the build system!

> only to have Android Studio force me to update Gradle and dependencies and whatnot, and break everything This. And people are surprised that many just wrap websites as apps on Android.

If targeting Android people should first consider if their app can work as a PWA.

Try and do it. if you run into a deal breaking issue with PWA features, then wrap it in a minimalist app shell.

Best case: everything works on Android and iOS and it's also a website.

Worst case: you will end up doing some platform specific code and dealing with the app stores like you were going to do anyway.

Average Case: everything will work on android and some things will be broken on iOS.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#26
post #24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which other actual alternative should we use for Android development besides Java and webapps.

I am not a fan of Java, but going from Java to C is not an improvement.

It depends purely on what you’re making.

It would be silly to write low-level software in Java, or high-level software (with exceptions for software which would require a low-level language) in C.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a fan of Java, but going from Java to C is not an improvement.

It depends purely on what you’re making. It would be silly to write low-level software in Java, or high-level software (with exceptions for software which would require a low-level language) in C.

> It would be silly to write low-level software in Java

Depends on what kind of low-level stuff.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#29
post #27
post #22

Make? Jesus Christ people are still using that? It's like people don't realize that other languages have been created in the last 20 years

Obviously the complete and utter crap that gradle/maven are is much better, right?

Yes. Definitely. Ignore your blind rage of Gradle/Maven for a second and realize that they’re literally next iterations of Make.

Re: Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make

#30
post #13

Now we only need to embed Lua into this to write the high-level logic, and we may have a winner for stuff that does not need a lot of accessibility support. Like, say, games, or media players. Easy to link C libraries that do performance-critical stuff, or writhe your own C code. (Then gradually rewrite the core in Zig.)

Love2D has Android support. It's surprisingly easy to setup: https://github.com/love2d/love-android
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