[Python-Dev] Exposing the Android platform existence to Python modules (original) (raw)

Shiz hi at shiz.me
Fri Aug 1 20:09:30 CEST 2014

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Charles-François Natali wrote:

Well, Android is so popular that supporting it would definitely be interesting. There are a couple questions however (I'm not familiar at all with Android, I don't have a smartphone ;-): - Do you have an idea of the amount of work/patch size required? Do you have an example of a patch (even if it's a work-in-progess)? - Is there really a common Android platform? I've heard a lot about fragmentation, so would we have to support several Android flavours (like #ifdef ANDROIDVENDORA, #elif defined ANDROIDVENDORB)?

Absolutely! I maintain a public repository of patches against CPython v3.3.3 at 1.

They are divided into three large patches: one fixes some issues I encountered with CPython's build system for cross-compilation, one fixes Android/Bionic's numerous locale issues (locale.h/langinfo.h support in Android is basically a set of stub functions that return NULL), and the last one is a set of 'misc' fixes for things that affect Android, mainly smaller things like missing fields in struct passwd and the like.

With those patches, CPython 3.3.3 will cross-compile to and run on at least my own Android device, a Moto G running Android 4.4.2. What's left to fail is fix the numerous regression test failures and their causes. I documented some of my findings at 2. :)

As far as Android fragmentation goes, to my knowledge that mainly refers to fragmentation at two levels: the Android versions numerous devices run tends to differ greatly, and the screen sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios vary greatly. Obviously the latter is a problem beyond the scope of CPython, but the former could lead to some issues.

Luckily however, the NDK3, the SDK of choice to use for C/C++-level applications, is fairly unified and expected to be used for pretty much all Android devices. Essentially there should be only the NDK for CPython to target, with a variety of NDK versions to support depending on which versions of Android CPython chooses to support. So far I've been only testing against NDK r9c, so I'm honestly not all that familiar with the changes different NDK versions bring, but from what I heard up until NDK r10 were mostly toolchain updates and header additions for new Android versions.

I'd dare say that the vast, vast majority of Android devices out there are running on the same base, namely AOSP4 with numerous vendor fixes/drivers/additions, and that custom Android distributions would try not to break NDK compatibility.

Kind regards, Shiz

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