Android NDK is a companion tool to the Android SDK that lets Android application developers build portions of their apps in native code. It is designed for use only in conjunction with the Android SDK, so if you have not already installed the Android 1.5 SDK, please do so before downloading the NDK.
The Android NDK provides tools that allow Android application developers to embed components that make use of native code in their Android applications.
Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of their applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain classes of applications, in the form of reuse of existing code and in some cases increased speed.
The NDK provides:
* A set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources
* A way to embed the corresponding native libraries into application package files (.apks) that can be deployed on Android devices
* A set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future versions of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5
* Documentation, samples, and tutorials
This release of the NDK supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for libc (the C library), libm (the Math library), the JNI interface, and other libraries.
The NDK will not benefit most applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks; notably, using native code does not result in an automatic performance increase, but does always increase application complexity. Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on. Simply re-coding a method to run in C usually does not result in a large performance increase. The NDK can, however, can be an effective way to reuse a large corpus of existing C/C++ code.
Please note that the NDK does not enable you to develop native-only applications. Android's primary runtime remains the Dalvik virtual machine.
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Requirements:
· Android SDK
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
Toolchain improvement:
· The toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0, which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code than the previous one (4.2.1).
· Note that the GCC 4.4.0 C++ frontend is more pedantic, and may refuse to compile certain rare and invalid template declarations that were accepted by 4.2.1. To alleviate the problem, this NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, which can optionally be used to build your machine code.
OpenGL ES 2.0 support:
· Applications targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.
· A new trivial sample, named "hello-gl2", demonstrates how to render a simple triangle using both shader types.
Name simplification:
· This NDK release is just called "r3", for "Revision 3", to indicate that it is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some developers thought that the previous release's name (1.6_r1) was confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android 1.6, which was not true.
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