Android++: Native development and debugging extension for Visual Studio

by uonyx • 12 years ago

70 54 12 years ago

bdfh42• 12 years ago

Interesting - but to quote from the Android developer website:

Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on. When examining whether or not you should develop in native code, think about your requirements and see if the Android framework APIs provide the functionality that you need.

shadowmint• 12 years ago

They also say:

     In general, you should only use the NDK if it is essential 
     to your app—never because you simply prefer to program in C/C++.

Which continues to annoy me even now.

I recall the fireside android team chat one time (two years ago?) that went something like:

     Question: So what about the NDK? You can't beat native for performance...
     Android team member: *laughs* ... well, you can't beat java for portability
     Comment from audience: Unless you want to use your code on another platform...
     <awkward silence, discussion moves on to next question>

That's certainly how I feel about it.

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

Good point. For better or worse, iOS is native code, and you could potentially write C or C++ that targets both.

pjmlp6• 12 years ago

Yeah, right.

However,

- Google has managed to fragment the Java world

- Pushes Renderscript instead of OpenCL

- Forces everyone to go via JNI to access Android APIs in C and C++ land

They are no better than the other players.

I am actually curious to find out what are their plans in regard to ART. Only replace Dalvik, or go further in terms of what will be the set of supported languages.

djh_2• 12 years ago

Don't forget games, the vast majority of popular games are likely running native code.

I don't have any stats on that, but you can check out the following games made using the open-source C++ framework Cocos2d-x that the developers asked to be featured:

http://www.cocos2d-x.org/games/all?p=8&page=1

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

Yeah, nobody wants to have a GC pause just as they're about to do something tricky.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

It is possible to make a substantially "NDK-only" app. Mainly for porting games.

melling• 12 years ago

What is like working with the NDK? C++ is the one language that can work on both iOS and Android (and Windows phone?)

Personally, I'd like to get some reuse out of my iOS code. I'd do more C++ if I knew that I could reuse it. Of course, Objective C could actually be portable too.

djh_2• 12 years ago

Having worked with the NDK in Android Developer Tools (Google's Eclipse Fork), it's pretty painful. It takes a long time to get the environment set up and working (somewhat) nicely. You have to get a plugin to debug via ADT, I used the ARM DS-5 debugger. It works, but it's not a good user experience.

I used to complain about certain niggles in Xcode, but having used ADT, I shall never complain again. Comparatively, using Xcode is a joy.

Maarten88• 12 years ago

C++ is the one language that can work on both iOS and Android (and Windows phone?)

C# can do that too, using Xamarin.

jaegerpicker2• 12 years ago

Pretty horrible. The gdb debugger is a pain in the ass to setup, there is no really good ndk based IDE, most of the UI and important API classes either aren't available or are vastly more complex to use, You still have to use java- if for nothing else to load and start the c/c++ code running, and JNI is a absolute pig of a technology for interfaces with other code. As a mobile dev working on iOS, Android, and Win Phone who occasionally needs the native performance of c I really wish it was better.

NickPollard• 12 years ago

I find the NDK fine to work with - but I'm writing a game which is entirely C plus some embedded Lua/Moonscript.

I develop on Linux (Ubuntu), with a make file set up to build for desktop or for Android with one command, and it just works. Took a little bit of time (maybe an hour) to get the build scripts set up for Android initially, but after that it's been great.

As I'm writing a game I'm using entirely custom UI etc. so I don't worry about not being able to access the normal Android UI classes and such. I do a little bit of JNI for loading resources but that was trivial to write. My game engine works exceedingly well cross platform for desktop X86 and Android/ARM.

My email is in my profile if you have any questions.

corresation5• 12 years ago

That is largely unfortunate dogma.

The most likely reason to use the NDK is when you are using existing C(++) code, for instance from your iOS or desktop versions of your app. For me the biggest advantage is building the app for Win64, using rich tools and a high power testing platform and just run a different make and now I have an Android app.

fredgrott• 12 years ago

I am curious, what are the benefits of VS over other IDEs?

Obviously, there is the case where the code shop may have other project assets tied into the VS ecology-dev system but is that the only case?

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

VS has amazingly good debugging tools. Other coding features seem to be prettymuch standard, like showing you arguments for a function you're calling and good autocomplete and refactoring and jumping around to declarations. It's got all the typical bells and whistles - all manner of GUI designers, Source-control integration, test-integration, code-review/commenting, etc, although they're very mature. I mean, it's obscenely featureful and the features are generally sensibly designed, so the sum is more than its parts there. The one place I really feel it actually shines is debugging.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

That source control integration is definitely not 'mature'. It's terrible. Forgetting that TFS is just awful to begin, the integration in VS is lacklustre and based around very poorly thought out identi-lists and identi-tables that it's hard to extract any information out of. Simple things like getting a list of changed files in a build is several clicks and barely readable when you do find it. You get lost on what screen you're in cause they all look exactly the same. You're never sure exactly what you're committing and it also likes to throw some obscure warning which 90% of the time means nothing, 10% of the time is a repo or commit killer.

Even something as basic as Tortoise SVN is a massive workflow improvement over trying to use TFS.

And test integration got vaguely good in this VS maybe? I wouldn't call it good or mature. Maybe it was 2012, they happened so fast I barely used 2012. I remember trying to use it in 2010 and clicking on failed tests wouldn't take you to the failing line or the failing test, it would do bizarre things like expand an info pane that didn't actually have the info you needed. It was such a complete failure that they totally ditched it in VS 2013 and had a whole new UI.

And don't get me started on the god awful profiler they've added, what a disaster.

Half the things they add in VS suck, but are better than nothing.

modeless2• 12 years ago

IntelliSense is the best C++ code completion/"jump to definition"/"find all callers" feature available on any platform. The Visual Studio debugger is the best C++ debugger I've used. That's pretty much it, but it's enough.

stusmall• 12 years ago

Code completion and jump to definition isn't unique to VS. Pretty much any modern IDE offers it. GDB is an extremely powerful debugging tool that has a feature set that is really hard to match. It just has an extremely step learning curve. I can't really see much of an advantage of this besides getting to use tools you already know, which no doubt is a huge advantage.

duiker101• 12 years ago

I tried many IDEs, I developed at lest one project in most of the common languages and I still have to find one IDE that get anywhere near VS. It is solid, with good extensions, tons of features but yet it's not scary and quite ugly like most of other IDEs. The only downside is that when you have 6 or more solutions open my computer starts to slow down.

Oh and has one of the best vim integrations.

piyush_soni• 12 years ago

At least one clear advantage is that Eclipse is horribly slow in debugging when compared to VS. I don't know how does IntelliJ compare to it because I haven't used that.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

Eclipse (at least for Android, I don't know how the platform-specific plugins affect this) is painfully slow period. My workstation is not new, but it is a decent quad core and it does have 8GB of RAM... yet even with nothing but openbox, a browser, and a text editor to contend with, it still manages to bog and lag consistently.

dragontamer• 12 years ago

With the rise of x86 Androids, is it really wise to start focusing on the NDK now?

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...

I assume the Samsung Galaxy 3 Tablet is a big "x86-Android" platform, which would obviously be incompatible with ARM-Android.

jevinskie2• 12 years ago

You can ship multi-arch APK (with MIPS too).

xamlhacker• 12 years ago

As the other poster responded, NDK is not limited to ARM. NDK makes it (mostly) easy to write C++ and then compile it to multiple ISAs (x86, ARM and MIPS) and then ship all the binaries in the same APK. When the APK is installed and run on the device, the device automatically picks the appropriate binary files in the APK.

If you have some code optimized for a particular ISA, say a function which uses ARM NEON, you also have APIs in the NDK which allow you to detect which ISA you are running on and dynamically load the appropriate for that particular architecture. However, this is an optional feature. For pure C/C++ code without ASM or platform-specific intrinsics, compiling for multiple ISAs is trivial using the NDK tools.

leobelle• 12 years ago

For C or C++ android development, what do people use on Mac? Xcode?

jaegerpicker2• 12 years ago

I used Xcode or the command line flow with (cgdb, the ndk command line tools, and sublime text as the editor). Xcode did ok for editing, syntax highlighting, and compiling but I could never get the debugging working in it. If I could have got the debugging and project setup working Xcode would have been really good, as it was it was a pretty bad experince.

mox12• 12 years ago

ADT is java and works on all platforms Eclipse works on. Additionally, the NDK (Native Developer Kit) is downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac. I've personally used Android developer tools with native development on OSX, it works fine.

corysama• 12 years ago

This is a very cool project. Anything that improves on ndk-gdb is tremendously exciting to me.

I hate to distract, but if this project is of interest to you, you should also check out https://developer.nvidia.com/tegra-android-development-pack It's a one-stop installer for the complete Android native development suite, a CPU profiler, a GPU debugger, Eclipse integration for native debugging and the best Visual Studio integration I've found yet (I have not yet tried Android++).

To my knowledge, Nvidia is doing more to improve the native development experience on Android than any other group on the planet (including Google). This is my plea to ask as many people as possible to try their package and give them feedback just so that they'll be motivated to put even more resources into the project.

It is quite awesome of Natural Motion to release Android++ to the public. Given their "No Hardware Restrictions" feature I understand their concern with relying on Nvidia. However, from working with Nvidia, I'm quite confident that Nv's primary concern is getting people to make high-performance games on Android at all. I would encourage Natural Motion and Nvidia to reach out and find ways to help each other reach their common goal -beyond simply providing friendly competition.

fidotron4• 12 years ago

This is certainly good for games and similar multimedia heavy type apps.

However, if you're using C++ for portability for any sort of non-realtime needs you've lost your marbles, and would be better off with JavaScript (no, really) and/or platform specific code to leverage the class libraries of the respective platforms. C++ heavy apps on Android are larger, use more memory, and load less quickly. This isn't obvious if you're used to other worlds, but it is a side effect of how pervasive Dalvik is on the system. Even if most of your app code is in C++ it's still easy to get screwed by a GC pause caused by where you have to interface with the framework.

Much of the underlying problem here is that speed-wise Dalvik just isn't very good. It wasn't even competitive with J2ME VM performance when it first appeared, and took a long time to get close.

With all that said, native debugging has been a sore point forever, and any improvement in that area is welcome.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

It's my understanding that this counter-intuitive performance problem with Dalvik is what crippled the original UI for Android Firefox - they were using their native C++ UI stack (the one used on Windows, Mac and Linux) to implement the whole browser UI, but they found that in practice a UI stack written in Java running on Dalvik performed better because it wasn't subject to all the weird performance penalties from interacting with android frameworks.

acemarke• 12 years ago

I don't think that's entirely correct (yes, XKCD #386 applies):

First, I'd hesitate to use the phrase "native C++ UI stack". Mozilla's UI framework is XUL, which is a mixture of JS and XML. Presumably there's C++ underneath, but based on my reading it's a mixture of web-based technologies.

Second, because the original Firefox for Android UI was written in XUL, they had to load the entire Gecko architecture in order to render any UI. That was ultimately the performance issue, not "interacting with android frameworks".

Because of that, the goal of the rewrite was to be able to show the UI immediately, while loading the Gecko stack in the background.

There's some good info on this at http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2011/11/firefox-for-androi... and http://www.mozilla.jp/static/docs/events/vision/2012/04-mark... .

realharo• 12 years ago

If by JavaScript you mean making a webview-based app with something like Cordova/PhoneGap, then that's not a great option either. Pre-4.4 WebView on android is notoriously bad, and things as trivial as smooth scrolling are a huge issue. The same app performs fine on iOS and on Android 4.4 which uses Chrome's engine, but unfortunately it will be a while before older versions go the way of IE6. I agree that C++ is not a solution for portable GUI apps either (although it works great for portable games since OpenGL ES runs on pretty much everything.)

ivank• 12 years ago

https://crosswalk-project.org/ is a Chromium-based runtime that works on Android 4.0+

nly• 12 years ago

if you're using C++ for portability for any sort of non-realtime needs you've lost your marbles

Maybe if you're starting from absolutely nothing. If I had non-trivial functionality already written in native code then I suspect I'd rather write JNI bindings than do a complete rewrite in Java.

I'm also skeptical of 'use more memory' and 'load less quickly'. Even the GNU C++ standard library on an x86-64 desktop is a less than a megabyte. I can't imagine that being significant in either of those problem areas.

fidotron4• 12 years ago

You're making the precise mistake we're talking about: don't project from your experience of desktop Linux to Android. This equally applies for any Java platform too as the VM performance characteristics don't resemble any from the Sun/Oracle family.

The key thing is to understand what is involved to get an Android app to start up. This is terrifying when considering just the Dalvik case, but what most C++ types don't realise is that even if your app is using NativeActivity it means you are really subclassing this: https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/blob/mas...

This means in order to load the native lib you first have to load Dalvik, a whole load of classes relevant to the app, allocate the whole Dalvik heap for the app, and then you rely on the Dalvik code to initiate loading of the native lib. As a result this only becomes worth doing if the gains you're going to make exceed those losses, but I find it's quite common for people to ignore the downside, as a few comments here indicate.

Storage to RAM bandwidth on these things is not exactly stellar, so as a consequence loading takes a while. To make things worse if you want to deploy all supported native architectures you're multiplying the native code size by four, since you will want two ARM builds (v5 and v7), one MIPS, and an x86. As a consequence I'm unaware of anyone that habitually includes all of them, and just putting ARMv7 libs in is the norm.

corresation5• 12 years ago

C++ heavy apps on Android are larger, use more memory, and load less quickly. This isn't obvious if you're used to other worlds, but it is a side effect of how pervasive Dalvik is on the system.

Citation required, as this is entirely the opposite of every experience I've had actually building apps that use significant native code. What are you basing this claim on?

There really isn't anything magical about Dalvik (or ART) -- it is a per instance runtime. C++ code doesn't suddenly become heavier or slower to load because of Dalvik.

And of course the overwhelming majority of games are mostly built using the NDK.

RayDonnelly• 12 years ago

This is an interesting project for sure. WinGDB is quite similar.

From the rationale page:

"Large numbers of these developers world-wide use Visual Studio as their primary IDE. Either by preference, or other external factors."

I wonder if having fairly good tooling is one of those factors? And if so, will this encourage people to stick to Visual Studio?

I'd recommend developers to try Qt Creator for Android (there's no requirement to use Qt with it if you don't want to). IMHO, for native development it is already good, improving rapidly and has the advantage of being cross platform and Open Source, though it's build system (qmake .pro/.pri) is arguably worse than MSBuild. Once Qbs support is finished I'll happily retract that statement.

Android++: Native development and debugging extension for Visual Studio

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