Saturday, December 22, 2012

Android NDK now includes clang with Objective-C support

Apparently, the Android NDK started including clang in ndk-r8c. The Google folk had always disabled Objective-C from their gcc ports, making Objective-C support that much more difficult to achieve, but I had a hunch that disabling Objective-C from clang may well have been more effort than it's worth.

I just tried it with a vanilla, freshly downloaded ndk-r8d and a small Objective-C program compiled without problems, so it looks like my hunch was correct.

Of course, it didn't link because there is no runtime, but providing one is a much smaller effort than reconfiguring the entire toolchain. After that, it gets interesting...

Update: after getting a runtime, it linked and ran on my Galaxy II test phone.