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RakuDroid

RakuDroid is a PoC.

RakuDroid is a WIP. Please read this file entirely before doing anything.

RakuDroid's goal is to port Raku (a.k.a. Perl6) on Android platform.

The first work has been to cross compile Rakudo / MoarVM for Android. It uses the latest release of both at the time of writing, i.e. 2019.11. This has been possible with just 2 patches to MoarVM. The first makes the cross-compilation possible with Android SDK/NDK (see src/librakudroid/0001-Make-MoarVM-cross-compile-nicely-for-Android.patch), the second allows jit to work but, of course, only on x86_64 (see src/librakudroid/0001-Make-MoarVM-cross-compile-w-jit-nicely-for-Android.patch).

Next, work has been done to write JNI stuff, Raku helpers and to automatically generate bindings to interact with the Java side of the Android system.

Supported platforms

  • Build (cross compilation host): Linux x86_64 (I personally use Ubuntu, not tested on other distros but should work)
  • Targets:
    • Architectures:
      • x86_64 (typically the Android emulator for testing)
      • aarch64 (arm 64-bit, most new smartphones)
    • Android versions: 8.0 (Oreo) and above (API 26+)

Requirements for building

  • Internet access (to download Rakudo and MoarVM)
  • git and standard build tools (sudo apt install build-essential)
  • An Android device connected (can be the emulator) and reachable through adb (only one at a time), because cross-compilation tries to guess things by executing code on the device
  • Android Studio + Android SDK / NDK (default Makefile config is for installation of these in default paths, install SDK & NDK from Android Studio) - please refer to Android documentation

Building

To first check if everything seems to be OK, and look at customizable variables:

make check

To build:

make install-precomp

To specify a different arch than the default (which is x86_64):

make ARCH=aarch64 check

Customizable variables

The configuration variables can be passed as in the example above to the make command (no need to hack the Makefile). The list of these variables and their current default value is:

ARCH           ?= x86_64
API_VERSION    ?= 26
ANDROID_SDK    ?= ${HOME}/Android/Sdk
RELEASE        ?= 2019.11
DBG_CFLAGS     ?= -g -O0
PROJ_JAVA_PATH ?= com/example/myapplication

Makefile targets

These targets usable with make:

  • help (default): displays the file you're currently reading (README.md)
  • check: makes somes sanity checks about configuration and variables. Tests adb availability, NDK's cross compiler availability, presence and arch of connected device, etc… It also prints the variables actual values (so you can customize them when calling make check)
  • clean: cleans up RakuDroid target directory (app) and generated files (gen & gen.touch)
  • clean-all: cleans up everything and the resulting directory structure should become the one you freshly installed
  • clean-arch: cleans up what needs to be rebuilt for a different arch (to switch between them)
  • all: builds everything
  • install: make a gzip'ed tarball of the complete app directory with all needed files in it. You can actually use this target directly after make check to build everything
  • install-precomp: like make install but does the precompilation phase. You must use this target the first time, and only once. Unless you modify the files precompiled, you should only need to make install afterwards, e.g. when changing arch

Building process explained

MoarVM is arch dependant.

Rakudo is not completely arch independant. There is (for what we need) one shared library that is built with it: dynext/libperl6_ops_moar.so. That dynext/ part is a bit annoying because it prevents the library to be installed in jniLibs/$(JNI_ARCH)/ like the others because the Android system does not support subdirectories in that directory. We are then obliged to install it elsewhere. It also prevents the use of multi-arch building in Android Studio. This is why you must, when changing the arch, issue a make clean-arch then, after having switched the connected device, rebuild with make install.

When building the following occurs (in an order decided by make):

  • Rakudo is "git clone'd" from github at the release specified in the RELEASE variable. It is then built with no special processing, as it would be built for the host (it is)
  • MoarVM is "git-clone'd" from github at the release specified in the same RELEASE variable. It is then patched to allow cross compiling for Android. It is at this very moment that the device (be it a real device or an emulator) is used. Only one device should be connected and reachable with adb
  • libperl6_ops_moar.so is cross compiled using the source in Rakudo
  • librakudroid.so is cross compiled from the source in src/librakudroid/
  • The file android.jar is extracted, then javap is used on it to extract the class definitions and signatures. The resulting file is then parsed (using an ugly Perl 5 script that should be rewritten in Raku, especially for the regexes ;-)) to generate the bindings
  • If you typed a make install-precomp, there is a precompilation phase. Most RakuDroid modules are precompiled, and some generated bindings (the ones needed for startup, i.e. Activity.pm6 and its dependencies), along with the big sized RakuDroidRoles.pm6
  • As a final step, the app directory is created and populated, then tar.gz-ipped

Installation and test

As said before, this is a PoC. It is actually the second one.

The first goal was to have an Android application that, when launched, displays a kind or REPL. You entered the expression to eval, then clicked on "Eval", and the result (returned value) was displayed. The button "Extract Assets" was here in case the asset extraction has been interrupted at the beginning (should not happen, and this button is actually useless). Be careful, the evaluation step of REPL is done independantly each time. That means that a "my" variable is lost between evaluations. An "our" variable is kept, but you need to use it with the special package name RakuDroidHelper, e.g. $RakuDroidHelper::my-var at 2nd and forth times.

This is the second version of the PoC. It brings the Android system bindings. The variable $RakuDroidHelper::main-activity holds the activity object displayed and you can use the pre-filled text just by clicking "Eval" to display an Android Toast. More info will be given later in a separate file on how bindings are done and their use.

Once you have successfully make install-precomp'ed (that takes about 7mn on my machine), you should end up with a file MyApplication.tgz. Launch Android Studio, select « New Project » and use the Native C++ activity template. Keep the default settings (especially the ID of the application com.example.myapplication, or else overwrite the PROJ_JAVA_PATH variable), except for Android version to use, it should be at least Oreo (8.0).

Once this is done, in a shell, cd to the new application directory (which should be, using all defaults, ${HOME}/AndroidStudioProjects/MyApplication/), then issue a tar -xzvf /path/to/RakuDroid/MyApplication.tgz.

Last step, in Android Studio (which should have detected and refreshed all changed files), click on "run" (the green triangle) and voilà…

The application startup time is, on the emulator on my PC, about 10 seconds. On my smartphone it is about 7 seconds. This may seem long, but in my first tests it was about 13 minutes (yes, minutes !) on the emulator. Maybe this can be improved more.

Additional details / FAQ

What does the patch do?

The current MoarVM cross-compilation system:

  • makes assumtions on the target instead of trying to compile / execute tests executables
  • does not support the Android architecture at all
    • Android uses "bionic" as libc
    • first tests using gcc cross compiler on command line failed. Using Android Studio-installed SDK / NDK was the solution. These could have been installed from the command line too, although I haven't tested because I needed Android Studio anyway.

The 1st patch modifies the following 4 files in the MoarVM source tree:

  • build/probe.pm:
    • add a sub run which will be used instead of system() (or the backtick operator) calls when trying to run a test result. The sub replaces seamlessly (I hope so, not tested at the moment) the normal test runs when no try_run is defined. When there is one, it replaces it with a try_cp (to copy the executable to test on the target tempdir) followed by an effective call to try_run to run the test, and captures and returns the result back to the caller
    • replace all calls to system() and backticks with the appropriate call to run()
  • build/setup.pm:
    • add a %TC_ANDROID into %TOOLCHAINS list. It declares the compiler family as 'android' (actually that means clang with "bionic", that is set elsewhere) and adds a rpath for finding libs in relocatable versions
    • add a android key in %COMPILERS, leading to parameters suited for it, including the try_cp and try_run mentioned above
    • add a android key in %SYSTEMS, leading to an %OS_ANDROID containing a syslibs overwrite and that changes a -thirdparty/uv variable (UV_ANDROID, added in Makefile.in, see below, instead of UV_LINUX)
  • build/Makefile.in: adds the UV_ANDROID variable, adding 3rdparty/libuv/src/unix/pthread-fixes@obj@ to the list of objects needed by the build. It helps with some missing thread functions in bionic (no libpthread.so on Android)
  • Configure.pl:
    • bypass the "guessed" configuration based on crossconf detection if try_run is set
    • patch the sub setup_cross (this is where I don't know if the patch is good in all situations) to:
      • detect system triplets ending with -android(\d+), and remove the API version (the number) from it. That number is not used elsewhere, it is just here to detect and set the Android SDK compilation environment
      • do some trickery to get the configuration work correctly (need to test that on another cross-compiled thing to check if nothing is broken)

The 2nd patch modifies the following 3 files in the MoarVM source tree:

  • Configure.pl: add a variable cc_host (containing the cross-compilation build system compiler)
  • build/Makefile.in: set a Make variable from the above, and use that for (not cross) compiling 3rdparty/dynasm/minilua.c
  • build/setup.pm: set the above variable to gcc when compiling for Android

Why Oreo?

During my tests I've been stuck a while trying to generate a shared library you can also call as an (almost) regular executable. It seems that before Oreo, the linker was not sending argc and argv to the functions declared in the section .init_array, which I use. I could have used some nasty trickery with the stack there, but I prefered not to. So the dependancy to at least Android API 26 a.k.a. Oreo a.k.a 8.0.