Re: GCC compiler for ANDROID Nexus7

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 02/15/2013 01:13 PM, Jerome Huck wrote:
> > There seems to be some versions of GCC for ANDROID C/C++/Pascal working
> > or even Fortran, see the attached links. Can we hope one day to have
> > some official release?
>
> I can't see why not, but it'll require someone to contribute the code
> and commit to maintaining it.  I haven't seen any volunteers.

It also depends what you mean by "official". The GCC project 
(gcc.gnu.org) does not provide any official binaries, only the source code.

"Official" binaries are provided by others such as Linux distributions, 
hardware/software vendors, or for Windows the MinGW, MinGW-64 or Cygwin 
projects.

In case of Android, I think Google can be regarded as the only entity 
which could provide "official" GCC binary builds. To my knowledge their 
SDK/NDK does not contain Fortran support and given that the Pascal 
compiler is not part of the GCC source code but developed separately, 
doesn't increase the chance of inclusion. But only the future will tell 
whether they add one or the other to the SDK. However, the SDK is a 
cross compiler; what you are asking for is a compiler which not only 
compiles for Android but also runs on Android. Given that this is a very 
special purpose, I think it is pretty unlikely that Google will offer 
such an app. (That's my educated guess, future my prove or disprove this 
guess.)

Hence, – unless you can convince Google – you have to search for another 
entity which could offer some 'official' build. At the moment, I do not 
see any semi-official entity which would do this.

One possibility is to use Ubuntu – it presumably has a full GCC and runs 
on Android devices. However, it runs GNU/Linux and not Android. Cf. 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7 and 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_for_Android

Tobias