Android NDK ... how is it ?

Hi folks,

As mentioned in a previous post, I do quite some Android NDK development these days. And since you are accessing the low level of the Android system, you would just expect, more or less, "Linux for smartphones". Which is true ... to some extents ! First, if we are talking only about the kernel, you have somehow to accept it will be only a subset and some of the features are accessible only from a specific Android version and also dependent obviously to the current security level of the smartphone (rooted or not, SELinux activated etc) ... For example while in Linux you can easily bind a thread to a cpu it is less straightforward to do so on Android (we can still bind a process to a cpu) ... The kernel performance measurement api which allows to measure the number of instructions for a given workload, while existing in Android too, barely allow to measure generally a process ; but not per cpu ... Some C function wrappers functions might not exist until late from an api SDK level "point of view" (ie functions to loop through network interfaces for example but fortunately there are possibilities via the lower level interface ;-)) otherwise, for security reasons, you will generally not access most of hardware in a low level manner like the camera device, but only through the official NDK API provided.

In another hand, the libc is completely different, it is not the famous glibc nor the musl-libc but one called "bionic", which takes a lot from the OpenBSD one (feature-wise ... as it is mainly C++) like the memory allocator (a bit different and more fit to Android needs though), the presence of safe strings API like strlcpy/strlcat and so on ... which I appreciate for its practicality and security goals ... and remove a dependency I usually use under Linux which is the famous libbsd ...

Even though Android is not my primary world, I appreciate most of the aspects of the development despite the sometime frustrating but challenging limitations. Make me think I would appreciate a similar "ensemble" and widely available under FreeBSD, for example, which should be just awesome under the arm architectures ;-)

Apart of these, "same old same old" you might say :-) I continue to push little improvements for php and FreeBSD support not yet merged but seems accepted by the main maintainers like giving more FreeBSD specific options when developing with sockets like setting a cookie to be able to trace it from DTrace ... memcached,  the lead developer had promised he will look into shortly into my existing features proposal, so fingers crossed. Also got my first very little FreeBSD contribution ,among the two, merged for this year. Also I mentioned I try to contribute to a video game in order to make it work under FreeBSD. For who follows me on GitHub it is not a secret but otherwise it is xray the engine behind "STALKER the Call of Pripyat". This time I proceed step by step to avoid enormous, "code regression makers" and hard to review changes, one of them is already merged the second still in review. We will see how far it goes :-)