Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 157 posts

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

#101

Post by kllrnohj »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #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.

Because adding Go as an official language would be a monumental amount of work for vanishingly little benefit. Remember Android itself is half written in Java, so are you doing JNI calls for everything from Go? That's not fast nor "native". Are you rewriting the framework in Go? That's a crazy amount of effort.

And all for what? To satisfy a hobby itch that has no practical benefit? The problem of app developers is almost never the language. Hell, look at how popular web apps are even though JavaScript is the worst language in any sort of widespread usage. The platform is what gets people excited (or frustrated), not a language.

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

#103

Post by matsemann »

Given that it's a thin wrapper around GL and friends, could one have an alternate implementation of these calls and do most of the dev work natively on the desktop? And not muck around with devices or emulators except for some final / edge case testing?

I just remember working with Libgdx back in the days. A game framework made for Android. It however was cleverly designed in that you could just run it on desktop by changing which implementations were used for drawing/sounds/assets. Very nice to work with, could just recompile the app in seconds and test, even hot swap, compared to the other way of building an apk, installing, launching etc which took minutes per iteration.

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

#104

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

skybrian wrote: post #60

Looks like you still have to start by installing Android Studio, which seems excessive. Is there a way to just download an Android SDK? Looking briefly at the makefile, I think they might have avoided Gradle, though it calls other tools written in Java. I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle.

>I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle.

You generally don't need to touch gradle at all with flutter. Is your issue about having to install gradle onto your machine, even if you don't use it directly?

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

#105

Post by derjames »

kopirgan wrote: post #62

May be someone with deep pockets like Elon must get Linux to work on mobile. I know there's efforts going on but seems slow progress. That will break the back of the duopoly and also make things like this so much easier.

Maybe PinePhone or Librem5 are a good start.

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

#106

Post by skybrian »

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #104
skybrian wrote: post #60

Looks like you still have to start by installing Android Studio, which seems excessive. Is there a way to just download an Android SDK? Looking briefly at the makefile, I think they might have avoided Gradle, though it calls other tools written in Java. I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle.

>I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle. You generally don't need to touch gradle at all with flutter. Is your issue about having to install gradle onto your machine, even if you don't use it directly?

Yes, it’s mostly hidden, but it runs Gradle behind the scenes and that’s okay as long as nothing goes wrong.

(I used to work on it, or at least tried to before giving up in frustration.)

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

#107

Post by GreenWatermelon »

candiddevmike wrote: post #16
tredre3 wrote: 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.

Give ReactNative + Expo a try

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

#108

Post by fredgrott »

You know its funny all the Gradle sucks comments here....I use Flutter which behind the scenes uses Gradle builds for android targets....no Gradle problems whatsoever...maybe operator touching and changing Gradle was the feature and the problem??

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

#109

Post by rho4 »

_bin_ wrote: 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.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN