What can I access in Androids Native libraries? And How?

Question

I am completely new to the NDK.

I have done a couple of the tutorials including the hello from jni one and another one that calculates the sum of two numbers.

They involved using cygwin and the ndk to create the library so file and I have a bit of a grasp on how to insert my own libraries into the libraries layer of Android.

I have now been asked to access the native libraries on Android and see what I can use them for.

My question is can I do this?

The STABLE-APIS.txt document is a bit vague and mentions the following as Stable C++ API's in Android 1.5

---

cstddef

new

utility

stl_pair.h

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Does that mean I can access them?

If so then how do I go about it? I dont think that following the tutorials I have already done would be any help?

Any pointers on how to do this or links to tutorials etc.. would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

As others pointed out on the android-ndk group, you probably should just use the SDK. The NDK doesn't give you access to any features beyond those available with the SDK and it reduces the portability of your application. You should only consider it if you have legacy code written C or C++ (that doesn't use exceptions or RTTI). While some operations are much faster in native code, passing data between managed and native code is expensive and thus using the NDK only speeds up certain types of applications.