Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

31–40 of 157 posts

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

#31
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.

Quite a few game engines work and don't use Make.

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

#32
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.

XCode is awful but JetBrains makes the best IDEs. There are people that dislike all IDEs which I disagree with but understand.

VSCode isn't bad but disliking Android Studio just feels like you started with it and didn't want to learn a different tool.

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

#33
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

This really is a good way to go. The majority of apps can be a PWA just fine as long as you don't have to have an app in the Apple app store. If you need push notifications of the specific Apple variety or any other APIs that Apple doesn't think non-native apps should be able to call, then you'll hit some friction as well, but for the most part it's a pleasant delivery strategy.

Even now if I need a "native" app I'm looking very seriously at React Native first before rolling two totally separate apps in different languages.

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

#34
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.

C++ or Rust? Or Zig? Or D? Kinda pretty much anything else tbh?

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

#35
post #5
post #2

This is pretty great. The biggest reason I hate doing android development is the java (and to a lesser extent, kotlin) "ecosystem" is a pain. Java is a sucky language to write; Kotlin is less bad, but the whole build tooling/package management/IDE mania mess is still a hassle to use. So thanks to the author.

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!

Gradle/Studio rot is so bad. If you continuously keep up to date it's not so bad, but you're absolutely fucked if you want to open a project from a year ago.

Unfortunately this doesn't actually protect you from that since you still have to deal with that for both the actual "make an APK" step as well as the Java bindings for critical features.

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

#36
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.

Going from Java to C is a good step along the way towards supporting any language capable of calling C functions.

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

#37
Honestly the whole java/kotlin tooling is the worst to pick for mobile dev, and KEEP it after so many other great languages and tools that are out there. I don’t why google didn’t offer at least Go as a native alternative for android dev.

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

#38
post #20
post #2

This is pretty great. The biggest reason I hate doing android development is the java (and to a lesser extent, kotlin) "ecosystem" is a pain. Java is a sucky language to write; Kotlin is less bad, but the whole build tooling/package management/IDE mania mess is still a hassle to use. So thanks to the author.

Looking at the Flappy Bird post earlier I noted the structure of the repo to be simultaneously elegantly structured and yet still more complex than I would prefer. The structure is (using [dirname] notation for directories) [Repo Root] ...git and github files, READMEs... [Flappy Bird] ... project files, keystore, build.bat ... [App] [build] ... I'm ok with tools making a mess here as long as outputs is tidy ... [outp…

The `src` folder is structured that way because the Android NDK demands it. They're not just chosen by convention, but because the build tool searches for those files and subdirectories.

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

#39

Honestly the whole java/kotlin tooling is the worst to pick for mobile dev, and KEEP it after so many other great languages and tools that are out there. I don’t why google didn’t offer at least Go as a native alternative for android dev.

That'd require some form of collaborative behavior across internal organizations, and real planning!

I wake up every morning and thank God that Flutter exists. I can target Android without dealing with building on years and years of sloppy work.

Sunk-cost fallacy x politics leads to this never being fixed. I don't think Google can fix it, unless hardware fails entirely. There's been years-long politics that culminated in the hardware org swallowing all the software orgs, and each step along the way involved killing off anything different.

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

#40
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

C++ or Rust? Or Zig? Or D? Kinda pretty much anything else tbh?

So what you are suggesting seems to be, rewrite android_native_app_glue.c in (say) Zig and compile to the .so? Good, but it would nice to see a proof of concept. Also to see how extensive the work has to be: I am not checking all the tree, but android_native_app_glue has includes itself:

  #include 
  #include 
  #include 
Post reply on HN