[RFE] Android support, to be able to Embed jank in Android app and make work with Android NDK and bionic library

[hgkamath]

• Firstly, Thankyou to the the developer(s) of jank for the opensource contribution
• I was thinking about jank's cross-platform potential for making multi-platform apps.
• Suppose one were to try make a rust android app with jank as a embedded language
  • One would should be able to
    • compile jank as a shared library to arm64 using the Android-NDK and by linking to bionic library
    • bundle the llvm libraries along with the android app
    • bundle the jank library along with the android app
    • embed jank engine into the rust app
    • jank should be able to call native rust/C functions in linked libraries using ffi
• Why the bionic library takes mention here, is because, bionic is the C library for android, and it's implementation takes a non-posix stand on some thread functions in pthreads. So many software do not compile if not written to take care of it.
• I see this as being placed in the same niche as ClojureDart, but being able to directly get to native without a dartVM /dart-lang layer. One may lose direct flutter access, but gain access to more UI frameworks. There is a rust bridge to flutter libraries.
• Someone, an experienced developer, should attempt an example android template app, to show how this could be done.

Ref:

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_NDK

[jeaye]

Hi! Thanks for the discussion. I agree, this would be very cool. jank can currently work as an embedded library using the static libjank-standalone.a which is part of every jank build, but we don't yet have a dynamic lib.

Around July, I will be improving jank's portability, including the portability of jank-compiled programs. However, improving our embedding story is more likely not going to happen until next year, unless someone else picks it up.

If someone reading this discussion wants to jump into this, feel free to reach out to me for guidance. I'd be happy to review the changes necessary to get this working so we can upstream them. Otherwise, hang tight and I'll be focusing more on the embedded experience next year.