Re: [Caml-list] OCaml on Android

["forum@x9c.fr" <forum@x9c.fr>]

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...

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?


Hope this helps,

Xavier Clerc