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rohandhruva

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netflixtechblog.com 5y ago

Seamlessly Swapping the API back end of the Netflix Android app

rohandhruva
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Bare-metal Rust in Android 3 years ago

Haha, non-GC languages power the GUIs on Android fyi. Jetpack compose is powered by Skia. Chromium is powered by Skia. Skia is C++.

Skia is not something you use to write apps: it's a graphics engine, essentially something you use to draw polygons on the screen.

Why are you attacking me instead of defending your stance. All are allowed to have opinions and I am allowed to have one

I apologize if any of this sounded like an attack. I was trying to be funny with that meme-like sentence formation, but I don't profess to disparage anyone's skills or opinions.

I dream of Linux-desktop kinda situation where you can program in any language you want, where you are not hindered by any platform/framework, where you have complete freedom

Linux desktop is certainly not the dream world you describe. Practically, you _have_ to pick a toolkit: one of GTK / KDE / Qt / electron / etc. Maybe it helps to think of Android's toolkit (Views or Compose) as one of those.

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Bare-metal Rust in Android 3 years ago

There's a reason Chrome is mostly written in C++.

And for that same reason, you don't see many apps do the same thing. Any time Chrome needs to request a permission (access files, location, etc), it _has_ to use the system-provided Java APIs.

Even Google's own Flutter uses a C++ engine to run Dart applications.

As do most games, so you can essentially think of Flutter as a game engine that renders apps.

Android's JVM system is a collection of Java wrappers around C++ libraries.

As others have mentioned, this is very much not the case.

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Bare-metal Rust in Android 3 years ago

Tell me you've never done any Android development, without telling me...

This is such a low-effort "take" without any effort to justify _why_ you'd want something like this. There's a high amount of impedance mismatch trying to write GUIs in a non-GC language like Rust which _has_ to run on what's essentially a Java VM (ART).

At least with a language like Go, it somewhat makes sense, and has been attempted: https://gioui.org/

All this Java/Kotlin bashing is getting really old, especially for a forum like this one.

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