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A comment on Rust in the Android Platform. Parent comment

Re:Rust in the Android Platform by Argorak on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @04:07PM (#26716741)
The biggest problem here is that in Android, Java "owns" the app, so you will have to invert a lot of lines to make "develop a whole app in Rust" feel awesome.

But, TBH, I think Kotlin and Java are _indeed_ fine application languages.

What Rust is already quite often used for is for libraries that work on both iOS and Android. For a public example, see the Glean SDK: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/index.html

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Re:Rust in the Android Platform by berkes on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @04:44AM (#26721982)
> But, TBH, I think Kotlin and Java

I agree wholeheartedly.

But there will be a demographic of people who know Rust and not Java, but who might want to build an app. Somewhat similar to how there is an apparent need for "HTML+JS+CSS"-devs to build native apps.

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Re:Rust in the Android Platform by Argorak on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @05:46AM (#26722495)
Well, this is always a tradeoff: the cost of being away from the mainstream may outweigh familiarity with a programming language at some point.

I'm not sure if the argument for "HTML+JS+CSS" is purely familiarity, there's also technical arguments like portability and future-compatibility. But I _do_ hope that the portability story will become better in the coming years beyond just this stack.

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