Android NDK Introduction

The Android NDK is a companion tool to the Android SDK that lets you build performance-critical portions of your apps in native code. It provides headers and libraries that allow you to build activities, handle user input, use hardware sensors, access application resources, and more, when programming in C or C++. If you write native code, your applications are still packaged into an .apk file and they still run inside of a virtual machine on the device. The fundamental Android application model does not change.

The Android NDK is a toolset that lets you embed components that make use of native code in your Android applications.

Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows you to implement parts of your applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain classes of applications, in the form of reuse of existing code and in some cases increased speed.

The NDK provides:

• A set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources
• A way to embed the corresponding native libraries into an application package file (.apk) that can be deployed on Android devices
• A set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future versions of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5. Applications that use native activities must be run on Android 2.3 or later.
• Documentation, samples, and tutorials

Sooner or future in your Android game development attempt you may find the need to have some code that runs faster. It turns out that Android code written in C runs 10-100 times as fast as its Java counterpart. I can verify this, as I've already moved a few major components in my newest 3D game engine into native land. That's quite a boost but let's face it - C is a pain in the ass and while Eclipse is great for Java, it's not for C, right?
Wrong.

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