Code written in C/

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

can be compiled to

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

, or

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

native code In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a ver ...

(or their 64-bit variants) using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK). The NDK uses the

Clang Clang is a compiler front end for the C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ programming languages, as well as the OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, and HIP frameworks. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection ...

compiler to compile C/C++. GCC was included until NDK r17, but removed in r18 in 2018.

Overview

Native libraries can be called from Java code running under the

Android Runtime Android Runtime (ART) is an application runtime environment used by the Android operating system. Replacing Dalvik, the process virtual machine originally used by Android, ART performs the translation of the application's bytecode into native ...

using System.loadLibrary, part of the standard Android Java classes. Command-line tools can be compiled with the NDK and installed using adb. Android uses

Bionic Bionics or biologically inspired engineering is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology. The word ''bionic'', coined by Jack E. Steele in August 1 ...

as its C library, and the LLVM libc++ as its

C++ Standard Library The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard. ISO/IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it was ...

. The NDK also includes a variety of other APIs:

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also ...

compression,

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accele ...

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

graphics, OpenSL ES audio, and various Android-specific APIs for things like logging, access to cameras, or accelerating neural networks. The NDK includes support for

CMake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates an ...

and its own ndk-build (based on GNU Make). Android Studio supports running either of these from Gradle. Other third-party tools allow integrating the NDK into Eclipse and Visual Studio. For CPU profiling, the NDK also includes simpleperf which is similar to the Linux perf tool, but with better support for Android and specifically for mixed Java/C++ stacks.

References

{{Reflist Software development kits Android (operating system) development software