Android NDK comes out

SMARTPHONE OS DEVELOPER Google has released its third version of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

The kit, which can be found here, targets devices running Android 1.5 and higher. There are a few bug fixes and there are improvements to the toolchain binaries. This should result in slightly more compact and efficient machine code.

The Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.4.0 C++ frontend is apparently more pedantic than it was previously, so if you try any rare and formally invalid template declarations it might tell you to go forth and multiply.

The Android NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, however, which can optionally be used to build your machine code.

Software that targets Android 2.0 and higher can now access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This means that it can control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language. µ