Chapter 8. Interacting with other languages
Android applications are coded mainly in Java. Officially, Android also supports C/C++ using the Android NDK (Native Development Kit). But is it possible to develop applications using other programming languages? In this chapter, we’ll analyze the other possibilities.
During the summer of 2011, my company released an iOS game called Shaman Doctor. The game was developed using cocos2d-iphone, an iOS library. The cocos2d-iphone library is coded in Objective-C, but there are a lot of forks that offer the same API in other programming languages. One of the most active forks is cocos2d-x. Instead of using Objective-C, cocos2d-x uses C++, and the most interesting thing about this project is that the API looks like Objective-C. To get an idea of what the Cocos2d-x team has created, take a look at the following code:
As you might have noticed, the API is exactly the same, but to port a game from cocos2d-iphone to cocos2d-x you would need to port all your Objective-C code to C++, which is a boring task.
When I started looking for alternatives, I found a library called Itoa created by Dmitry Skiba. To understand what Itoa is capable of, let me quote its documentation (see section 33.5):
[Itoa] is a cluster of open-source projects hosted on GitHub that implement compiler, build scripts and various libraries to allow building Android’s apk from Objective-C source files.