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

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

#61

Post by re-thc »

yazzku wrote: post #49
wiseowise wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not blind rage. I've used them, they're over-engineered crap, like most things Java, especially the abominations made at Apache land. You can't say Make is over-engineered; lacking, maybe, but it does what it's meant to do and not much of anything else.

> I've used them, they're over-engineered crap

Compared to what? And in what way? And then for you to manually recreate it anyway? Like when you need NodeJs, typescript, Turborepo, webpack, babel and a whole list of tools and then you still need scripts to build and deploy?

Yes Maven and Gradle has its problems, but which tool is exactly better? They all just have their pros and cons. Which tool / framework in Go allows you to update a single dependency instead of the 100 that you might need and generates OpenAPI docs for you, etc etc?

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

#63

Post by promiseofbeans »

Whenever I need to touch XCode or Android Studio, I'm reminded how lucky web devs are now that almost everything has converged around Vite (death stare at NextJS). Everything Just Works(tm). Simple plugin system to integrate anything.

The few times there wasn't a plugin to do what I needed, I've managed to roll a custom one pretty easily.

When Vite breaks you're completely screwed though. Find a different way to do it or wait until a patch comes out. Vite internals are nigh impossible to fix on your own.

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

#64

Post by mdhb »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #63

Whenever I need to touch XCode or Android Studio, I'm reminded how lucky web devs are now that almost everything has converged around Vite (death stare at NextJS). Everything Just Works(tm). Simple plugin system to integrate anything. The few times there wasn't a plugin to do what I needed, I've managed to roll a custom one pretty easily. When Vite breaks you're completely screwed though. Find a different way to do i…

I sincerely Vite would just align with actual web standards rather than throwing in bits and pieces of their own nonsense. It’s precisely why it tends to break in seemingly unfixable ways

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

#65

Post by mdhb »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #36
38 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have WASM/WASI now which is almost certainly going to become the new gold standard of cross language interop.

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

#66

Post by MobiusHorizons »

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.

Getting Linux running is not the problem. All android phones have a working Linux kernel, and could probably be made to run some kind of Linux based software if you can get through the bootloader hurdles. The issues so far with open source phone stacks are largely around getting all the hardware talking with open source software, battery life, mobile appropriate UIs and finding ways to bring the apps people expect on board.

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

#68

Post by refulgentis »

mohn wrote: post #44
refulgentis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 culminate…

>I don't think Google can fix it Can they eventually throw away Android and replace it with Fuchsia? In the reporting about Fuchsia that I read ages ago, it sounded like it was intended to be an Android replacement but, looking into it again just now, it seems more like an embedded OS for other non-smartphone hardware -- maybe with some (aspirational?) claims of utility on smartphones and tablets.

Correct, tl;dr roadkill. I don't mean to be disrespectful, someone anonymous picked a bitter fight about this once. But to your point, its clear there was a larger context that Fuchsia was born from, and the ambitions and commitment to it are greatly different than they were at some previous juncture.

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

#69

Post by MaXtreeM »

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.

> curl -k "https://dl.google.com/android/repository/commandlinetools-li..." -o commandlinetools-linux.zip

unzip somewhere, set path variable

> yes | sdkmanager --licenses && sdkmanager "platform-tools" && sdkmanager "ndk-bundle" && sdkmanager "build-tools;33.0.0" "platforms;android-33"

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