On 12/13/16, Ranier VF <[email protected]> wrote:
> Eric, I believe that is you need (lifecycles events).
>
> http://www.ikerhurtado.com/android-ndk-native-activity-app-glue-lib-lifecycle-threads
> "Commands (lifecycle events) from Main (UI) thread"
>
> Best regards,
> Ranier Vilela
>

Thanks Ranier for the thought, but no, I am deliberately not doing
this. I've been down this path before multiple times and it always
ends in tears. The so called "Native Activity" is a misnomer (false
advertising) and it is half-baked. I have swapped notes with other
experienced Android developers in this realm trying to push hard on
actual native GUI applications and we all came to the same conclusion
that "Native Activity" should be disregarded.

There are tons of problems with it, but ultimately, the biggest
problem is that Native Activity runs on a background thread. This
basically makes your code a second class citizen on the platform and
makes it extremely hard to do anything because you are constantly
worrying about threading issues and locking issues because every
native API provided by the system is not accessible on your thread.
You can't just do a simple direct call to anything which makes it many
times harder to implement anything. There are also performance
problems and this became an issue for me on a prior project. I was
involved with another big cross-platform project that did stuff on a
background thread. Their designers thought this was a good thing, but
they never talked to a game engine person such as my self and didn't
understand things like latency and determinism (and other things like
the costs of context switching). Basically their APIs worked in one of
two ways...either async so I got the result back some time later,
usually way too late for my 16 ms window for a game or there was a
massive thread sync point that brought everything to halt for a simple
little function (which add up).

The design I'm pursuing for IUP is truly native Android UI on the
main/UI thread. This will keep IUP programs as a first class citizen
and make it easier to both develop for and integrate more advanced
widgets in the future.

Thanks,
Eric

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