By first party support, would you be expecting a Rust toolchain shipped in the NDK, or maybe Rust bindings shipped in the NDK?
I could see the latter, although I'd still question whether they should be special cased in terms of a Rust dependency compared to bindings being hosted on crates.io.
Or maybe they should ship scripts that shell out to an existing Rust toolchain.
The Android NDK just barely supports C and C++ either, unless you're ok with 1990's tooling standards. The whole thing feels like it's maintained by two dudes locked in a Google basement somewhere. I doubt they have the capacity to deal with Rust support in the NDK, unless there's a big strategic change in Android tooling.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Looking at a sample app [1] for the NDK, the tooling appears to be gradle and Cmake. Cmake isn't the newest of tools, but it's also not that dated.
Both Gradle and CMake have a strong late 1990's smell to them. While CMake is sort of a necessary evil in the C/C++ world, there's no excuse for dragging Gradle into the NDK, combining both build tools leads to a complexity explosion that rarely works and tends to break after either the NDK or SDK is updated, or somebody merely looks the wrong way at the build files.
Huh? "Barely"? What are you talking about? The NDK supports compiling C++ just fine. There are CMake files, among other things, ready to use --- as well as Soong native configurations. CMake is under active development. Other toolkits are within easy reach: for example, Meson works fine. Also Bazel. Hell, even autotools can be made to work.
Sure, building C/C++ code into an .so file kinda works but that's about it, try building the APK entirely with cmake, that's simply not supported, you'll have to integrate with Gradle. The result is a complexity clusterf*ck that's a nightmare to maintain.
The NDK team should take a long hard look at Emscripten to get some inspiration how native code development is integrated into a 'native-hostile' runtime platform.
