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

Yes, I botched that one, agreed.

> It's pretty easy to avoid boxing if you don't want it. They are separate types after all. Even so, Android lint has an inspection for it, and Intellij (presumably Android Studio too?) has an inspection you can turn on to detect it [1]. If you're running afoul of autoboxing, it's probably mostly in collections-based code and you'll want something like fastutil [2].

Autoboxing is a contradiction of "It's pretty easy to avoid boxing". It's specifically egregious for any place where you need performance guarantees.

> I don't understand this. You aren't using more than "native size" on any platform in any language without some sort of emulated Big* type.

Because you don't have unsigned integers (or arithmetic). So, for example, if you're playing with a 16-bit unsigned value, then you need a 32-bit signed integer to hold the 16 bits you care about (and you can kind of pretend you have 16-bit unsigned arithmetic.) But if you need a native-sized unsigned integer, you're out of luck.

> Implementations typically have both escape analysis and a nursery generation for this. This works well in a desktop/server environment.

Not on Google's VM the last time I tried. Shit went on the heap and the "concurrent" GC would then stall the entire application for ~1s every ~10s.

> I'm knee-deep in GDX and LWJGL, right now, but again not in a mobile context. I used to hang out in the Java gaming forums with the folks who originated LWJGL (e.g. cas).

I used to be on #LWJGL on Freenode, but it seems the guys moved to Discord or something.

By the way, we haven't talked about how horrible the JNI is, which requires you to wrap every C function so that you can pass around the JNIEnv handle and to manually marshal data structures to/from, like you're writing fucking Lua bindings or something. The right way to do FFI is the Haskell way, where you just call the function and get compiler support for auto-marshalling data structures (and, if you want, you can get your Haskell program to build and statically link the C library from source; no need to compile separately using another build tool and then dynamically load a shared lib.) Even C# does it better than Java. So in the use case where you have optimized C code and the rest of the application in Java, even the bridge itself is a pain in the ass to write.

Which is why most code that really cares about optimal HW utilization is vectorized explicitly - it's problematic to assert against potential regressions between compiler versions and addressing them is just as brittle.

I agree that's an issue but I would say it's a separate one. At least in Android these days you don't have to agree to everything upfront (during installation) but you can choose the permissions you want to grant one by one later during runtime. E.g. when the app wants to access the camera, it asks you for access right there and then and you can also only give it one-time access. That's already been a big UX and security improvement and I'm sure this can be improved even further.

> Like I give file system or drive access to some app so it can pick pictures.

In past versions of Android yes. Nowadays, however, in order for the app to access select photos it no longer needs the general file system access permission. The file picker has become a system component, and by picking photos you grant the app access to the selected files and the selected files only. Of course if the app is, say, a photo gallery app, then it will probably still need access to your entire camera folder (or even the entire file system), not just individual files. In such cases, I at least will probably review the app a bit more carefully.

> Do I know what else it does with that permission?! Just have to trust.

That's always the case when you grant permissions to someone or something. At least, the more fine-grained your permission system is, the more control you have, and the easier it will be for you to build that trust.

In my case I usually disable internet access[0] for apps by default, so that even if they need access to, say, my entire file system, they won't be able to send my files anywhere or do anything shady. Only for select apps that I've reviewed carefully I might also enable internet access.

Either way, I hope we can agree that Android gives you a lot more control over what you allow your apps to do than Linux. In Linux I have to blindly trust all apps at once. It's all or nothing.

[0]: I use GrapheneOS. In regular Android the internet permission is no longer exposed to the user, I think.