You cannot even call OpenGL ES directly?

 

That would explain some weirdness in the Xamarin libs…

 

Cheers,

Jon.

 

From: Kristopher Micinski [mailto:krismicinski@gmail.com] 
Sent: 19 September 2013 21:58
To: Alexandre Pilkiewicz
Cc: forum@x9c.fr; Ivan Gotovchits; Jon Harrop; Caml List
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml on Android

 

Yes, so this is what happens if you want to just run an ocaml binary on your
Android device.  If you actually want to do anything android related at all
(other than running a binary in the shell, treating your device like it's a
linux computer) then you have to run inside a VM, so you can actually talk
to the GUI, SDK, etc...

 

Kris

 

 

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Alexandre Pilkiewicz
<alexandre.pilkiewicz@polytechnique.org> wrote:

http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/ocaml-on-a-nexus-7/

 

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Kristopher Micinski
<krismicinski@gmail.com> wrote:

 

 

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 2:19 AM, forum@x9c.fr <forum@x9c.fr> wrote:


Le 19 sept. 2013 à 06:35, Kristopher Micinski a écrit :


> With a little bit of hacking it'd probably work, but I'm not sure of the
status of ocaml-java and haven't looked into the implementation details.
Since ocaml-java outputs class files (afaik) you'd have to sort of hack the
android build pipeline yourself, but that wouldn't be the hard part: all the
tools are there.  The harder part is that the Android SDK is very Java
oriented, and it just feels awkward as hell to use in OCaml even if you were
to write a thin wrapper around the SDK.

In theory, you are right that it wouldn't be hard.
In practice, the problem is that OCaml-Java emits classes
for Java 1.7 while (to the best of my knowledge) Android
only accepts Java 1.6 classes. As far as I know, there is no
other pending problem.

From this point, the question would be: is it better to wait
for Android to update to Java 1.7 (or even 1.8...), or to
modify OCaml-Java? Honestly, I would need quite a bit
of encouragement to modify OCaml-Java in this direction...

 

Yes, that would be a deal breaker.  That fell under the technical points of
ocaml-java with which I wasn't familiar.

 

Regarding interaction with the classes of the Android SDK,
one may be interested in the typer extension allowing to
manipulate Java instances from pure OCaml code:
    http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/preview/javaext.html
The main potential problem with this approach is that the
extension currently allows only to implement interfaces, but
not to extend classes. It may be a problem if for example the
event system of Android is based on abstract classes.
Another problem may be the "linking", i. e. the way Android
expects to execute an application: is it a bare main method,
or is there a need to implement/extend a given interface/class?

 

Yes, it does rely on extending an abstract class.  This does, in fact,
permeate the framework.

 

kris