D for Android beta

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 2 June 2017 at 08:36:49 UTC, Dušan Pavkov wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 June 2017 at 19:31:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> The beta release of ldc 1.3, the llvm-based D compiler, is now 
>> out:
>>
>> https://github.com/joakim-noah/android/releases
>>
>> It is accompanied by a non-trivial sample app from the Android 
>> NDK, ported from C++ to about 1.2 klocs of D: the classic Utah 
>> Teapot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot), updated 
>> with mobile touch controls.  This app also demonstrates 
>> calling Java functions from your D code through JNI, though 
>> most of it is written in D.
>>
>> There are two builds of ldc, a cross-compiler that you can use 
>> from a linux/x64 shell to compile to Android/ARM, and a native 
>> compiler that you can run on your Android device itself.  As I 
>> pointed out last year, not only is ldc a large mixed D/C++ 
>> codebase that just worked on ARM, but it is possible to build 
>> arbitrarily large Android apps on your Android device itself, 
>> a first for any mobile platform:
>>
>> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/ovkhtsdzlfzqrqneolyv@forum.dlang.org
>>
>> This is the way the next generation of coders will get into 
>> coding, by tinkering with their Android devices like we did 
>> with Macs and PCs decades ago, and D is one the few languages 
>> that is already there.
>>
>> I will write up instructions on how to write an Android app in 
>> D _on_ your Android device by using ldc and the Termux app, 
>> and get ldc into the Termux packages, a package repository for 
>> Android:
>>
>> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en
>
> Hello,
>
> Thanks for the post. I have tried to run apk on 2 devices:
> 1. LG-E440 phone with Android 4.1.2
> 2. Orange Pi Lite (development board with Allwinner H3 CPU) 
> Android 4.4.2
>
> On both devices there was only gray rectangle with "Teapot" 
> notification at the bottom for about a sec and then in upper 
> left corner the FPS info (around 60 on both devices), but 
> without any graphic. I have tried taping, dragging etc.
>
> Are Android versions a problem or it could be something else?
>
> Thanks in advance.

I'd guess that's the issue, as I haven't tested against those 
older versions of Android and this app links against Android API 
21, ie 5.0 Lollipop:

https://github.com/joakim-noah/android/blob/master/samples/Teapot/build-apk#L17

I'm pretty sure it'd work for your older Android versions if 
built slightly differently, as I used to support back to Android 
API 9 until a couple months ago:

https://gist.github.com/joakim-noah/f475b0be37b3834b4e50d68996b6ee1d#file-ldc_1-1-0_android_arm-L3438

It can be still made to so but I set API 21 as the minimum, 
because anything older has been declining for some time now:

http://blog.davidecoppola.com/2016/12/android-version-distribution-history-visualization-2012-2016/