Android support

[mboes]

According to experiments by @angerman, building for Android is possible but Android does require slightly different linker flags when building. #70 has more about this, but we want to achieve the same effect using a configure script.

[mboes]

@angerman feel free to assign yourself once you've accepted the invite link to the project.

[nomeata]

If I could use jvm (or even inline-java) in Haskell reflex apps compiled to Android to access the full Android API, that would be very useful.

[mboes]

@nomeata would you like to commandeer the task? I doubt we'll have have to work on this ticket anytime soon, but would certainly welcome contributions.

[nomeata]

No, unfortunately not. My interest here is only for a side aspect of a side project of mine, so I’ll certainly only be uesful as a clueless user who may report if stuff doesn’t work…

[lambdadog]

Starting to look into this -- looks like the way forward is using defaultMainWithHooks autoconfUserHooks in Setup.hs and using autoconf to write extra-libraries: jvm to jni.buildinfo conditionally based on whether we're building for android (or another non-ljvm target) or not.

I'm not any kind of autoconf wizard though, so it'll probably take me a couple of days to figure out how to actually write out the configure.ac itself to figure that information out.

[nomeata]

That’s amazing, thanks! I just published my first Haskell program via the Play Store, and one of the things missing is easy access to the Android API (Blog post will come soon)… :)

[lambdadog]

Currently cabal doesn't pass the build target to autoconf scripts, only --with-compiler= and CC=, which means we can't use target information directly from cabal. I've gone ahead and opened haskell/cabal#7038 for now and I plan to take a look at drafting up a PR for it when I have the chance, but even when changes are merged they'll be on cabal master, which will be a while out from actual, practical widespread use.

It should be possible to extract the target from ghc --info the same way that cabal does it in our autoconf script, using AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS and some kind of sed/grep/awk incantation, but it's definitely going to be a bit of cruft added doing something like that.

@angerman Should I go ahead and move forward with this solution, or would the original solution of using a flag be preferred to this kind of hacky shell incantation?

[user16332]

Android is now supported via haskell.nix, plus some minor gotchas.

#197
#198
#199

[angerman]

👌 Wow. 6 years. Time flies 😱

[nomeata]

exciting! Is there already a blog post or something that shows this in action?

[user16332]

exciting! Is there already a blog post or something that shows this in action?

Just getting started but I'll remember to ping you. Meanwhiile @angerman is the (somewhat involuntary) authority on all things haskell.nix and Android.

[user16332]

#207 partially solves this.

Android needs Nix cross compilation that is still w.i.p.