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发帖数: 1034 | 1 The State of Go Language for Android Native Development
by Sergio De Simone on Jun 27, 2014 | Discuss
A couple of different proposals from Google engineers and independent
developers are aiming at making it possible to write native Android apps in
Go. This will not go so far as allowing Go apps to access the full Android
NDK, but it could allow access to a subset of it.
According to David Crawshaw, engineer at Google and author of a proposal to
add partial Go support for Android apps, "providing a Go equivalent to the
Android platform is intractable. The platform is written in Java and has a
huge API surface."
There is however, says Crawshaw, a subset of Android apps written against a
much smaller C-based API surface provided in the Android NDK: Games. Thus it
becomes feasible to build Go support for Android providing the equivalent
features found in the NDK.
Crawshaw proposes that during the Go 1.4 cycle, support for a GOOS=android
option will be introduced to the Go repository that will include:
Bindings for OpenGL, OpenSL, and OpenMAX as exported through the Android
NDK.
A Java -> Go language binding generator. Given a Go package, this will
let Java code call it, so game menu UIs can be built in the standard SDK.
Android Studio build system integration.
Crawshaw's proposal to bring Go to Android is not the only one. Elias Naur
suggests to extend Go toolchain so that it supports the creation of shared
libraries. This would allow to create an Android app which uses a Go library
loaded and run in Android apps as distributed in .apk files. An important
requirement for this to happen has been already satisfied in Go 1.3 by
adding support for cross-compilation. Cross-compilation is required because
the NDK does not run on Android itself and only executables and shared
libraries compiled and/or linked with the Android NDK are guaranteed to run
on Android devices.
The latter proposal is based on an existing open-source project by Elias
Naur, goandroid. Goandroid patches Go tools and runtime to allow the
creation of shared libraries that can be run within native Android apps and
is not officially supported by Google.
Finally, a more comprehensive framework that aims at allowing to write
Android native applications in Go is Mandala. Mandala uses the Goandroid
toolchain and according to its creator, Andrea Fazzi, thanks to Mandala "you
can develop, test and run your application on your desktop and then deploy
it to an Android device. It encourages the use of idiomatic Go for writing
Android applications: communication happens through channels and not
callbacks."
Mandala comes close to Crawshaw's proposal, feature-wise, and also aims at
providing a solution mostly for games: "The framework should not be
considered a high-level game engine but as a basic layer onto which game
engines can be built or existing ones can be used." Fazzi warns that Google
does not support native Android development in Go, but expresses his hope
that "the present work could act as a sort of incentive in the direction of
an official Android support by the Go Team." |
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