Android NDK r6 Released

July 13th, 2011, 23:47 Posted By: wraggster

This is a day late but none the less important to the mobile efforts. Google released the sixth major version of its native development kit (NDK). For those who are unaware this allows you to run C/C++ on Android devices and communicate to the Dalvik via the Java Native Interface (JNI).

This release brings us one very cool change for future tablet owners. You can now build for x86 architecture! Truly exciting for the next generation of tablets running on Intel chips. (http://gizmodo.com/5551822/intel-oak...-meego-support).

For developers this release brings a critical new piece of software for the debugging process. Currently debugging the Java side of things is 100% solved and very easy to use. However if you need to debug things in native land you are completely sol unless your phone manufacturer left gdb support available on it (or you can root your phone). The NDK does come with ndk-gdb which is gdb as we all know it. However some phones like mine (HTC Incredible S) are locked down in some nasty ways that as a side effect broke gdb. So really all I have to go on is a stack trace which contains all hex addresses and no symbols, only which library the crash occured in. There are ways to take the stack trace and a decompiled version of your library start to map things out. This proved cumbersome at best. Finally Google has released ndk-stack. This analyzes the stack trace and spits out some meaningful information.

http://blackbird.usask.ca/wordpress/?p=182

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