Thursday, September 15, 2011

Program Android apps using Assembly?

On Hack-A-Day
Have you got what it takes to code Android apps using Assembly?

Do you have a rooted Android device and a computer running Linux? If so, you’re already on your way to coding for Android in Assembly. Android devices use ARM processors, and [Vikram] makes the argument that ARM provides the least-complicated Assembly platform, making it a great choice for those new to Assembly programming. We think his eight-part tutorial does a great job of introducing the language and explaining how to get the development tools up and running. You’ll need to know some basic programming concepts, but from what we saw you don’t need any prior experience with ARM or Android.
So why learn Assembly at all? We took a stab at Assembly for AVR a few months ago and really learned a lot about the hardware that we just never needed to know writing in C. It’s a great way to optimise functions that waste too much time because of quirks with higher-level language compilers. That means you don’t need to write your entire application in Assembly. You can simply use it to streamline hairy parts of your code, then include those Assembly files at compile time.

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