[Mobile-sig] support of the android platform

[Russell Keith-Magee]

(Apologies for the personal repost - I forgot to reply-all on the first
attempt)

Hi Xavier,

Great stuff!

I’ve got a question about your experience integrating with the native
Android platform APIs.

Getting CPython compiled as a native binary library is a huge step, but my
experience has been that bridging between binary libraries and the
Java/Dalvik APIs is a painful process - JNI *exists*, but it’s *really*
slow, and has some pretty harsh limitations (like the kernel-imposed JNI
reference count limit).

For some applications, this won’t matter - for example, if you’re treating
the android device as a low power server, something that is terminal only
isn’t a problem. However, if you want to write a native app, then you need
to be able to create an Activity, with a View, put a Button on it, and a
Layout, and so on. Have you done any exploration of the binding to these
native APIs?

Also - are you going to be at PyCon US by any chance? If you are, I’d love
to catch up and share notes.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)



On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Xavier de Gaye <xdegaye at gmail.com> wrote:

> Starting with API level 21 (Android 5.0), the build of python3 with the
> official android toolchains (that is, without resorting to external
> libraries
> for wide character support) runs correctly.  With the set of patches
> described
> in the patches/Makefile file at [1], the cpython test suite runs[2] on the
> android x86 and armv7 emulators with only few errors[3].  Those errors are
> listed with their corresponding error messages, this may give a raw idea of
> the effort needed to support this platform.
>
> This post has been first submitted to python-dev as:
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-April/144320.html
>
> Xavier
>
> [1] https://bitbucket.org/xdegaye/pyona/src
> [2] To reproduce these results, follow the instructions found in INSTALL
>     at https://bitbucket.org/xdegaye/pyona/wiki/install
> [3] https://bitbucket.org/xdegaye/pyona/wiki/testsuite
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