It feels like a no-brainer for them to want straightforward usage with, say, Python. Is it really a performance thing?
I guess the Java bias is very strong among the ex-Sun and ex-Danger OS developers that have joined the team since the early days.
You see this on Google IO presentations from the last couple of years, when the audience asks about alternatives, including existing JVM languages.
The initial build & deploy times for Clojure on Android are annoying, but using a REPL to edit your Android app dynamically is amazing.
Taking a picture, for example, needs only
(android~takePicture (tmp "img")
'((Intent)
(... do something with the image) ) )
(de takePicture (Dst Fun)
(startActivityForResult Fun
"android.media.action.IMAGE_CAPTURE"
"output" (fileUri Dst) ) )It's sad when a clean slate project for a platform created when we should have known better decades ago still ends up with this kind of overhead.
It perfectly matches my recollection of doing Android development too: a big uncontrollable mess of different kinds of files whose inter-dependencies and relations are completely opaque.
So trying to use this to build an Android app with the native (i.e. Java) Android UI libraries probably wouldn't work too well, right?