Android compatibility?

[SiliconDroid]

Great work guys!

Will this library (and dependencies) build with Android NDK? Would love to eventually build a binary and write a C# interface for a Unity engine IOTA plugin.

P.S. I was told in discord to raise this as an issue by user Thibault.

[Cylix]

Hey,

Thanks for this issue! That's a really good idea and I'll definitely look into it.

We already have a roadmap for the next releases (stable release, performance improvement, cross-platform support and embed support). So these do not include NDK support as of now.

However, I'll keep that in mind and will check the workload to think about when we can do that. Basically, my thinking is that if the workload is not too much, it can possibly be included in the v1.1.0 (cross-platform support). Otherwise, it might be done later depending on the priorities.

You can learn more about our current roadmap/timeline here.

In any case, we will keep you up to date on this issue whenever there is a move concerning this :)

Best

[Cylix]

Little update concerning this issue.

I started to look a little at how Android NDK works. There are basically two main options to use a C++ library with Android:

• Compile the library directly within Android Studio. This may provide increased support, but it also requires a very specific syntax from what I have seen, which would make it hard to port it.
• Compile the .a or .so, then load it into the Android application. From what I saw, it is only supported starting from Android API 23? The good part is that it does not require any code change. I guess the entire library need not to be rewritten, but all the public API may require some changes concerning the input/output.

So I'm gonna have a try for the second option and double check the minimum required API. If any API can support it, then this will definitely be the standard solution to go. Otherwise, for lower APIs, it would require to port the library and, considering the workload it requires, this may be done later on.

I'll update this ticket when I will be done testing and going deeper in my searches.

[Cylix]

Ok, after investigation: yes, the NDK support loading of shared libraries, but only prebuilt one with the NDK tools.

That means that we need to integrate our toolchain to the Android NDK and make changes the front public API to allow conversion from the C++ environment to the Java environment.

I guess the workload to do that is too heavy to integrate that on the side of the other incoming releases. We will probably do an additional release for that after the v2.0.0 as v1.2.0 and v2.0.0 are more critical.