ARM has announced the launch of the ARM Development Studio 5 Community Edition, a suite of Eclipse-based tools that are designed to aid Android application developers who use the NDK to write native code. The tools will simplify the debugging of native ARM code in Android applications and provide visibility into performance characteristics to help developers optimize their native code for the ARM architecture.
Android applications are generally coded in the Java programming language and compiled to run on the platform’s Dalvik runtime environment. There are some rare cases, however, in which the performance penalty makes managed code impractical on a resource-constrained mobile device. That is why Google launched the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) in 2009.
The NDK provides a convenient way for third-party application developers to incorporate native libraries coded in C or C++ within their Android applications. The NDK is useful in a number of contexts, such as game development, that involve intensive computing. The new tools from ARM will ameliorate some of the standing technical challenges faced by application developers who use the NDK to wring more performance out of their software.
Although the toolkit will undoubtedly be welcomed by developers who rely on the NDK, it’s worth noting that this might not be the best time to start building architecture-specific Android applications. Android is getting increasingly comfy on the x86 architecture due to Intel’s growing commitment to the platform. Android applications that rely on native code compiled for ARM aren’t going to work out of the box on future Intel-based Android devices and current ones like the newly app-enabled Google TV products.
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