Which IDE to use for NDK development (May 2015)

[Ben Hirashima]

I've been out of android development for the past two years, and have no experience with the NDK or Android Studio. I need to port an iOS app to android that uses a lot of C++ code to run some sensor fusion algorithms. What's the current best IDE to use for heavy NDK development?  Is Android Studio's support for the NDK and C++ debugging up to par yet? What about Visual Studio with something like VisualGDB, WinGDB, or vs-android? Or is Eclipse is still the way to go? Thanks.

[Felix Homann]

Am Freitag, 8. Mai 2015 03:16:41 UTC+2 schrieb Ben Hirashima:

 What's the current best IDE to use for heavy NDK development?

Emacs + shell for the C/C++ part. Everything else in Android Studio.

 

  Is Android Studio's support for the NDK and C++ debugging up to par yet?

There's absolutely *no* support for NDK development in Android Studio. The gradel plugin though can build NDK projects though. That's all.

[Ray Donnelly]

Visual Studio 2015 is meant to have native Android support. I've no
idea how well it works, but I'm interested to find out.

Qt Creator has support for Android too. You don't have to develop Qt
applications to make use of it and you have the option to use Windows,
OS X or GNU/Linux as your build machine. Qt Creator isn't capable of
Java debugging unfortunately.

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[Michael Moussa]

For cross platform ios/android c/c++ development I use xcode and debug my native code in iOS where I can. When I have to explicitly debug Android ndk I use log statements :(

On the android side I have studio setup with Gradle for building ndk code and java code and debug my java code in studio.

[Vector Ralf]

Been developing native Android games since early 2011.  We've tried all kinds of solutions to get native C++ debugging to work on Android, but nothing so far has turned out to be production-ready.  The main issue in the end seems to always be GDB flakiness.  Sometimes it works, but often it doesn't, and you end up having to reboot your dev system.

However, 99.9% of our code is cross-platform C++, so all of our gameplay development is done on the PC.  On Android we simply do command-line builds with printf debugging for the thin java wrappers around the various SDKs we use.

Looking forward to trying out Android Studio once it integrates the NDK, but I'm most excited about the potential of VS2015, since we already use Visual Studio for most of our platforms:  PC (Steam etc), WinStore, WinPhone, XB1, PS4, XB360.

[Vector Ralf]

As a follow-up, we just switched to using Visual Studio 2015 RC for our next project, and so far debugging is working flawlessly.  There are still some minor build environment issues (e.g. no parallel compiling within a project, etc), but this is a huge shift/improvement for our Android version.

[Jacob Kwitkoski]

This all depends the your requirements of your project. I'll highlight some of the advantages/disadvantages of each IDE that I've used so far.

Eclipse

Pros:

• Use the info here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Sequoyah/ndk_guide to get set up with gdb integration. No more need to rely on printf debugging!
• Great for doing both C++ and Java debugging, useful for tracing through both sides of JNI calls
• Easy to set up integration with third-party SDKs (jars for Android, or Android Library projects)

Cons:

• Can be difficult to set up/maintain debug configurations

Android Studio

Pros:

• Easy to set up/maintain projects and integrate 3rd party SDKs
• Flexible Gradle build system: able to call ndk-build to build your C/C++ code
• The "official" Android IDE put forth by Google

Cons:

• No easy support for integrated gdb debugging (have to rely on printf debugging your C++ code)

Visual Studio 2015

Pros:

• Support for internal build system as well as external tools (ndk-build)
• Fast(er than gdb with Eclipse), reliable C++ debugging using the Visual Studio debugging tools you know and love.
• Fast integrated x86 emulator (requires Win 7/8/8.1 Pro for Hyper-V)

Cons:

• No java debugging support.

My main setup is still Eclipse, but I'm keeping a watchful eye on both Android Studio and Visual Studio 2015 in terms of full-featured (Java/C++) Android development/debugging.

On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 6:16:41 PM UTC-7, Ben Hirashima wrote:

[jje...@istation.com]

Are you comments re:  Android Studio pertinent to 1.2 or 1.3?

I ask because I thought 1.3 had gdb support.

[ben morris]

There's also the Android M Developer Tools preview. See here:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/android-m-developer-preview-tools.html

[s.rawat]

Is Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 available for development under Linux PC as well?Has any one tried its preview version?It would be great to have glitch free debugging for native android development using this.It has been a great in Windows Application Debugging!!

--

[Eli]

We use Nsight Tegra, Visual Studio Edition.
It's a VS plugin, developed by NVIDIA (based on vs-android, AFAIK).

It adds Android as another platform (Android, Win32, x64 etc... ) so you can use the same VS environment, and the same VS projects, to develop both for Android and the PC. 
It supports native C++ and Java debugging on the device.
 
I would highly recommend it.

[s.rawat]

For native Android development is it suited for other Non-Nvidia platforms.What is the latest Visual Studio Compatible for it.

--

[Eli]

From my experience, the NVIDIA plugin works fine on non NVIDIA devices.

As for the latest VS version supported, quoting the documentation:

"MS Visual Studio 2010 SP1, 2012, or 2013 Professional (or higher) Editions"

I don't know if the "or higher" includes VS 2015.

BTW, I see that the vs-android plugin is being updated again, after being dormant for a while.