Google has announced the release of NDK r5 for Gingerbread – the latest version of its Native Development Kit for Android, designed to assist studios working on the platform.

The new NDK incorporates APIs that should, in Google's view, make writing code in Java a thing of a past, with games written entirely in C and C++ now able to run on the platform with very little alteration.

Android awesomeness

Its launch encompasses everything that firm initially set out to achieve with the NDK, claims Google Developer Advocate Tim Bray.

"With the latest version of the NDK we intend to further increase the awesomeness of your applications, this time by a pretty big margin," he said on the Android developer blog.

"With NDK r5, we're introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code, handle common application events, control windows directly, manage EGL contexts, and read assets directly out of APK files."

No nonsense NDK

Bray states that the NDK comes with a prebuilt version of STLport, making bringing STL-reliant apps to Android a somewhat easier process.

NDK r5 also adds backwards-compatible support for RTTI, C++ exceptions, wchar_t, with the addition of improved debugging tools.

"We worked hard to increase the utility of the NDK for this release because you guys, the developers who are actually out there making the awesome applications, told us you needed it," Bray concluded.

"This release is specifically designed to help game developers continue to rock; with Gingerbread [Android 2.3] and the NDK r5, it should now be very easy to bring games written entirely in C and C++ to Android with minimal modification.

"In short, this release addresses many of the requests we’ve received over the last year since the first version of the NDK was announced."

[source: Google]