Android NDK For Linux

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.