Android ported to .Net

[bcjenkins]

I find this very interesting. In particular because SageTV is also written in Java too..

https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS

[Fonceur]

Well, there has already been an Android x86 for a long time, and this project is about porting Android 4.0 to C#... So I'm not sure what is interesting about it in the context of SageTV...

[reggie14]

Well, this is pretty different than porting an OS and applications that are written in a high-level language to a different instruction set. Although, conceptually there are some similarities.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I think the main conclusion to draw from this is that Android's Dalvik is pretty bad. There's no reason that c# code should be inherently any faster than Java code. In fact, I think you'd ordinarily expect code to run slower after automatically translated to another language/bytecode.

This approach probably wouldn't be very useful on platforms with better Java VMs. But it does indicate Android performance could be much improved with addtional optimizations to Dalvik. But, I'm increasingly convinced that the number of Android developers at Google is astonishingly small.

[Fuzzy]

Android's base on Java is it's biggest hindrance in my mind. It's just NOT a modern language. .net is just that much better in every way. The way the CLR works is just so much smoother and more versatile (compatibility AND scalability) than the bytecode/dalvik system. The only advantage java had over .net, is there were far more java programmers out there when android was developing than .net - but that is rapidly changing.

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by Fonceur

Well, there has already been an Android x86 for a long time, and this project is about porting Android 4.0 to C#... So I'm not sure what is interesting about it in the context of SageTV...

I made a few mental jumps and assumptions.

1. SageTV would need to be integrated in some form to GoogleTV which is Android based.
2. SageTV is written in Java and the same tools used to port the Android code could be used to port the SageTV code.
3. Most HW extenders leverage Linux as an OS. Switching to .Net from Java could also provide some performance benefits there too if the article is to be believed.

B

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

1. Most HW extenders leverage Linux as an OS. Switching to .Net from Java could also provide some performance benefits there too if the article is to be believed.

Other devices don't use Dalvik. They probably use Java SE Embedded, that has better performance than Dalvik.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Android's base on Java is it's biggest hindrance in my mind. It's just NOT a modern language. .net is just that much better in every way. The way the CLR works is just so much smoother and more versatile (compatibility AND scalability) than the bytecode/dalvik system. The only advantage java had over .net, is there were far more java programmers out there when android was developing than .net - but that is rapidly changing.

Oh yeah.. plus, Microsoft's .NET is actually an open standard... unlike Sun's Java.