Monday, December 29, 2014

C C++ programming on Android [added g++ and vim to the package] (ARM specific)

NOTE: Same as old one. If you are dumb enough to spoil your device or emulator (lol), don't blame me. Try at your own risk

For long we have distanced using android as a development machine. This might not be far.

Yesterday, I successfully compiled gcc that could run on android. And today without much delay g++ is here. I've also added vim from my older post. Now you can push all the binaries to the phone and have a nice programming package on phone. I have done a basic sanity test on the binaries and they seem to be working fine. I've also included three sample programs in the bin directory. If possible remove them before pushing to the device. (for details on how to push them to the emulator see my last post)

This system will create binaries that will definitely run on all arm (32 bit) android devices. That means you can compile on your phone and then send it to another phone and it would work (lol, what am I writing. Sorry, sleepy :( ). This will create similar binaries to that of your ndk. So basically all the executables that you could compile with your ndk. Now you can on the phone.

Now to the backsides of it. It takes up large space (around 500 MB). Most of the system partitions are smaller than this so it would require that the partitions be resized and mounted. I could probably make a zip to install but due to this problem it wouldn't work on most devices. You need to edit the system partition size. And I have no idea how to do that, because I don't have an android phone. But if there is anyone willing to do this, please let me know how that turns out.

I've seen a friend of mine try use vim on his phone. And trust me it sucks. We will need a better editor and also a better terminal. For now I would suggest using terminal emulator to try it out. But it will not be as good as a personal computer. I wonder how it will be on a physical keyboard android device. I will search for my old HTC Dream, and hopefully it will work. I also have memory issues on that to be taken care of (half GB extra system storage on HTC Dream, you got to be kidding me). I will let you guys know how that turns out. Meanwhile have fun trying it out.

And ya I almost forgot download it here.

PS: I did try to make a nice build system out of this. But due to my laziness and non-linear working style it has become difficult to put together a script to do the whole build as I initially intended to. But I promise that in near future that I will try and put it up on github or something, after I get it to work. 

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