2013-03-19

Vala on Android

Breaking news in the Vala programming language mailing list here.

It has been managed by tarnyko to compile Vala sources under Android and be able to use Cairo. GTK+ has not to been ported. I'm quoting the interesting part of message verbatim below:
I managed to compile a Vala source directly to Android binary yesterday. And I think it might be of some interest to some people here.

For the record, I've written a tutorial here: http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/25

It's still very limited (only access to core Vala + GLib/Gobject methods) but it could easily be extended by porting libraries having Vala bindings ; although I know it's not easy stuff.

For the graphical part, GTK+ doesn't work yet but I know Cairo has been ported (http://code.google.com/p/cairo4android/) -and Cairo definitely has Vala bindings.

More information at the Vala programming language homepage.

2 comments:

  1. About GTK on Android (and all platform SDL supports, such as iOS):
    GTK can be ported to Android using SDL.
    This has already been done with TK in place of GTK: TK working in Android using SDL (and the same could be done with GTK, and other GUI toolkits).

    TK working in Android using SDL

    LINK: ->
    http://members.shaw.ca/tnbaker/SDLTk/
    this is the GUI toolkit TK on SDL (using a "calls wrapper" for X11)
    quote: SDLTk is the result of a month-long hatchet job on the Unix version of Tk 8.4.11. SDLTk is the Tk GUI drawn completely inside an SDL surface. Basically there is an Xlib wrapper around various SDL-based rendering operations. Tk thinks it is running under X11.

    You can see it in action on Android here, at Androwish:
    http://www.androwish.org/index.html/home
    quote from Features paragraph:
    Based on Tim Baker's earlier SDLTk project.

    TLDR:

    So the methodology of using a "call wrapper" for X11 to SDL allowed running a GUI toolkit on an SDL platform (in that case Tk on Android, but could also be GTK on Android, GTK on iOS, etc)

    Cheers!

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