Pascal on Android: I made it work!

[paul_nicholls]

Congratulations mate! I will have to try some of this myself as I have an Android tablet

cheers,
Paul

[paul_nicholls]

hmm...it seems that I need Android 3.x on my device first, so I don't think I will bother going this route then (I only have 2.3.x ATM).

I will have a play with RemObjects' Project Cooper (Oxygene for Java (and Android)) and see if I can get something running that way instead, even though I have to get used to the syntax first LOL

cheers,
Paul

[chronozphere]

hmm...it seems that I need Android 3.x on my device first, so I don't think I will bother going this route then (I only have 2.3.x ATM).

I don't really see the problem with this. What happened?

[paul_nicholls]

I don't really see the problem with this. What happened?

The problem is that I don't have a 3.x version of Android available for my device yet, only 2.3.x. This means I would have to wait to try this method out till after I can get a later version installed.

cheers,
Paul

[code_glitch]

Does anybody know whether SDL works?

I believe that is possible, I recall a discussion about this earlier on in the year, I'll run a forum search and see if I can pull anything up, HOWEVER - if sdl is slow on a PC and that has many GhZ and many gigs of RAM (despite less pixels to shift) unless your on the new A(5 is it?) which have 2 cores I can't see it being the best idea. My suggestion would be to either look into OpenGlES and write a compact little unit or to look into ZenGl, I know Andru's been putting in some magic stuff there and it runs on just about anything that has a transistor in it.

Aside from all that, theres a FPC 2.7.X out?! We're still on 2.5.5 in the APT repos... I'll have to check out my debs manually then. Oh, and one last thing: does the new lazarus interface still have those one million and one pesky windows floating about?

[chronozphere]

The problem is that I don't have a 3.x version of Android available for my device yet, only 2.3.x. This means I would have to wait to try this method out till after I can get a later version installed.

cheers,
Paul

Why not develop for 2.3? Nothing wrong with that. It's all possible.

Well, I will use SDL in conjunction with OpenGLES. However, it seems that SDL Audio doesn't completely work on android yet, so I might just go for pure OpenGLES with another sound library (any suggestion that works for android?). Maybe I should just wrap the JAVA audio API via JNI, but that's no fun at all.

And FPC 2.7.1 was build from the most recent development snapshot, so it's not the stable one. You can get it here: http://www.freepascal.org/develop.var The APT repo's (guess you are using an ubuntu/debian derivative) aren't updated frequently. I had to get debs or build things from source quite often to be honest.
Lazarus hasn't changed that much. The only difference I have found yet, is that you can't rebuild the LCL anymore via the menu's, because it's now a package (which is automatically rebuild for your target when neccesary ^^)

[Ingemar]

How about the rumored "low level" APIs, C APIs into Android? Does that exist, how much of the Java garbage can be bypassed?

[Stoney]

How about the rumored "low level" APIs, C APIs into Android?

They are available, but there are no Pascal header translations for that - at least not that I know of. Also, the C APIs aren't really for usual GUI app development, they are designed for OpenGL apps or other low-level stuff.