Forth apps in GForth/Android?

[lehs]

Can a Forth program in GForth for Androids easily be turned into an app on Google play?

[Julian Fondren]

On Friday, February 5, 2016 at 9:50:56 AM UTC-6, lehs wrote:
> Can a Forth program in GForth for Androids easily be turned into an app on Google play?

It could be easy, but it isn't right now. You could have

1. apps that install some Forth libraries and assets and then
leave it up to the user to invoke them with gforth. This is
possible and easy, but you have to build the app with some other
language and of course the result isn't that desireable.

2. apps that install some Forth libraries and assets and then
launch gforth after patching gforth's files to use them. This
is possible (with the same caveat), but too troublesome in the
Android environment to be worth it.

3. apps that use gforth's own libraries (Forth and C - the .so
files on an internal file system which are protected by default
but which can be opened with gforth itself). This is possible
but you still have to reimplement the NativeInterface or
whatever that gforth is using, if you wanted to use that.

4. a build of gforth that's branded to your app and that runs
your own code instead of the default code. This is ideal but
requires that you be able to build the Android version of
gforth. I stopped trying to do this when I hit the requirement
on a custom fork of swig, but my tolerance these days is pretty
low -- I start to think of better things to do when I have to
figure out which version of autotools to use, and that's step
zero. But there are instructions and you could try following
them. And gforth obviously gets built.

5. a normal commandline ARM build of Android that's run in a
separate process, to support a normal Java-or-whatever Android
app. This is possible but requires that you write the app in
some other language, and you may find that you write more and
more of the app in that language. Such as all of the UI code.

A net2o launcher was added a few months ago with comments about
this being intended to show how specialized launchers could be
done, so some support like that may come along.

Presently the only Forthlike language that you can use to make
real Android apps that you could publish to a store is 8th:
http://8th-dev.com/


-- Julian

[lehs]

Thanks!
I have to try point 4 above then, if I want to make a normal app in GForth.

http://forthmath.blogspot.se/

[Ron Aaron]

On 02/08/2016 06:19, Julian Fondren wrote:

> Presently the only Forthlike language that you can use to make
> real Android apps that you could publish to a store is 8th:
> http://8th-dev.com/

Thanks for the mention!

[Albert van der Horst]

This is interesting information.

>Presently the only Forthlike language that you can use to make
>real Android apps that you could publish to a store is 8th:
>http://8th-dev.com/

On a happier note. If you're satisfied with a console application,
and you're on an Intel, you can use lina to make turnkeys
(what everybody outside Forth calls "compiling programs").
It is like with the first IBM-XT, when we discovered that
there are other languages beside BASIC to program them in.

From a console:

cat >hello.frt
: hello "hell world!" TYPE CR ;
^D
lina -c hello.frt
./hello
hell world!

I've no idea what it takes to get things into the Android store,
but it may help that hello is just one statically linked binary,
so you need to distribute a mere single file.
If you want applications like:
" get me all pictures from all directories on my SD-card "
" Scan my SD-card for duplicate pictures and delete them"
" Throw away all pictures from my android system, that have
been archived on the SD"
" delete all thumbnails: pictures where a higher resolution version
is available"
a lina compiled binary could even be useful.

Frans van de Markt just mailed me that his ARM lina for android
works ... except for making executables.

>-- Julian

Groetjes Albert
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst

[julian....@endurance.com]

On Monday, February 8, 2016 at 5:53:56 AM UTC-6, Albert van der Horst wrote:
>
> On a happier note. If you're satisfied with a console application,
> and you're on an Intel, you can use lina to make turnkeys
> (what everybody outside Forth calls "compiling programs").
> It is like with the first IBM-XT, when we discovered that
> there are other languages beside BASIC to program them in.
>
> From a console:
>
> cat >hello.frt
> : hello "hell world!" TYPE CR ;
> ^D
> lina -c hello.frt
> ./hello
> hell world!
>
> I've no idea what it takes to get things into the Android store,
> but it may help that hello is just one statically linked binary,
> so you need to distribute a mere single file.

You also need a launcher. A signed .zip with some (compiled)
XML, some (compiled and then bytecode-translated) Java, and some
other assets - like an icon to identify the app.

Terminal IDE is an Android app that you can use to create
standard Java Android apps with just an Android device. Its
tools could be called by lina, or just be part of a build
system, that produces launchers and bundled lina turnkeys. This
is pretty easy. What gforth will still have in its favor is its
OpenGL architecture, java interface, etc. But if you're willing
to do the UI in some other language then you can certainly
publish an app to Google's or Amazon's stores that has an
internal lina executable that does the real work of the app.

> If you want applications like:
> " get me all pictures from all directories on my SD-card "
> " Scan my SD-card for duplicate pictures and delete them"
> " Throw away all pictures from my android system, that have
> been archived on the SD"
> " delete all thumbnails: pictures where a higher resolution version
> is available"
> a lina compiled binary could even be useful.
>
> Frans van de Markt just mailed me that his ARM lina for android
> works ... except for making executables.

Cool. When that's published I'll put a Terminal IDE build
system together as an example.


-- Julian