Note that Apple is known er use Rust for some of its infrastructure and Google is adopting Rust in a big way in Android and Fuchsia.
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Currently the Android team doesn't have any plans to expose Rust support on the NDK/AGK, anyone going down that path is expected to support themselves in Android Studio, Gradle, CMake, android-ndk, AAR/Bundles, JNI integration.
I mean, you say "support themselves" but e.g. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/01/09/android-ndk-update-r25...
Nothing of that covers "Android Studio, Gradle, CMake, android-ndk, AAR/Bundles, JNI integration", which an Android shop expects to have out of the box support in the Android SDK installer.
Note that android-ndk in that comment means the original Makefile based build tooling, which CMake builds still lack some corner cases in functionality, hence why I listed both.
So, just to be clear, in what languages do I not need to "support myself" under your definition and what does the "support" consist of?
Do I get an Android test phone to try my software out? Is there like free phone support so I can chat to some expert in my language about Android problems? You make it sounds like a pretty big deal, but my small experience† of writing Android software a decade ago was that it just wasn't that hard.
† I wrote an implementation of the now obscure mOTP (similar to TOTP) for in-house usage. For obvious reasons I named This One Time app "Band Camp" which was already a pretty old reference at the time but once I thought of it I couldn't help myself.
Java, Kotlin and C++.
The languages with tier 1 support on Android SDK tooling for app development, properly configured out of the box after a SDK full install.
https://developer.android.com/guide/components/fundamentals
Which by the way, also includes a phone emulator to try out your stuff, including simulation of hardware events.
No need to get a phone.
> Java, Kotlin and C++.
I just tried this and... no C++. You can add the NDK and start building stuff with C++, but that's also exactly how the Rust offering works. If the result was actually a properly configured out of the box C++ development environment that would be pretty nice besides the Android stuff, but it isn't, the actual result out of the box is you get to pick Java or Kotlin.
You can do C++ native development for Android, but only via basically the same route as Rust, there's just not the huge gap you implied.
Since when does Rust appear as language selection on the NDK installer?
Has out of the box support on Android Studio for:
- mixed language debbugging
- project templates wizard
- code completion and linting
- JNI bindings generation
- two way editing between native JNI wrappers and Java/Kotlin native method declaration
- packaging of Android libraries for native code
And for game developers, if they so which, plugins for Visual Studio with similar capabilities.
In both cases, official support from Android team if there are issues with the above tooling.
Apparently you haven't tried enough, if you think bare bones NDK integration with cargo is enough for Android shops.
Maybe Rust will get on https://developer.android.com some day, but it isn't there today, even despite the fact that it is being used for Android internals, there is zero documentation on how to write Android drivers in Rust.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture
So lets not pretend it is the same effort using Rust on Android, as it is for the official SDK languages.