D for Android

[Etienne Cimon via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 19:38:12 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Monday, 25 May 2015 at 20:08:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Monday, 18 May 2015 at 15:47:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Sure, have fun with your new devices. :) Hopefully, I'll get 
>>> Android/ARM working before then, but I don't and won't have 
>>> any AArch64 devices to test.  Not that it matters, as 64-bit 
>>> ARM has even less share than x86 right now.
>>
>> Earlier this week, I stumbled across a way to get TLS working 
>> with ldc for Android/ARM, similar to the approach used for 
>> Android/x86 so far.  Exception-handling on ARM for ldc is 
>> currently unfinished 
>> (https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/489), so if I 
>> disable a handful of tests related to that, I get 36 of 42 
>> druntime modules' unit tests and around 31 of 70 phobos 
>> modules' unit tests to pass.  All tests were run from the 
>> command line on my Android tablet.  It appears there are 
>> issues related to unicode and the GC causing many of the 
>> remaining failures.
>
> Some good news, I've made progress on the port to Android/ARM, 
> using ldc's 2.067 branch.  Currently, all 46 modules in 
> druntime and 85 of 88 modules in phobos pass their tests (I had 
> to comment out a few tests across four modules) when run on the 
> command-line.  There is a GC issue that causes 2-3 other 
> modules to hang only when the tests are run as part of an 
> Android app/apk, ie a D shared library that's invoked by the 
> Java runtime.
>
> I've compiled an Android/ARM app that will run the remaining 
> majority of tests on Android 5 Lollipop or newer, which you can 
> download and try out on your Android 5 devices:
>
> https://github.com/joakim-noah/android/releases/tag/apk
>
> All tests run on my Android 5.1 device, while the last two 
> modules tested by this app hang on an Android 5.0 device I 
> tested.  All patches used are linked from the above release.

Thanks, I didn't remember you were the one working on this. I've 
been following this and I'm just as eager to start testing my 
libraries with it.

I think Android could also use a cross-platform web plugin 
framework. I've started to refactor the idea, and just being able 
to enhance a website with native code on any platform would be 
great, it would really make up for being forced into doing 
all-javascript when writing the UI in HTML5/CSS right now.