[pypy-dev] What stops ARMed PyPy 2.1 from working on Android?

[David Schneider]

On 06.09.2013, at 17:23, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am certain there is no roadmap for Android or else I'd already found
> it, but still is there any list of issues to be addressed to get PyPy
> running there?
> 
> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2013/08/pypy-21-considered-armful.html
> 
> Modern Android tablets are ARMv7, so after 2.1 hardware is not an
> issue. As for platform, it looks like android-scripting project is
> able to compile CPython to be run on tablet,
> http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/source/browse/#hg%2Fpython-build
> 
> 
> It would be nice to plug keyboard into Android tablet and start polling its API
> with PyPy...
> --
> anatoly t.
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Hi Anatoly,

currently nobody is working on PyPy for Android, although contributions are welcome. From the hardware point of view there should be no problem in running PyPy on a modern Android device. 

There is no comprehensive list of issues to get PyPy running on Android. The first issue to solve is to get the cross-translation process working with Android in order to be able to create a binary. The translation process creates several small c-programs that need to be compiled and run on the target platform to collect information about it before cross-compiling the final binary. For ARM/Linux we do this using scratchbox2 that uses qemu to emulate an ARM processor. A similar approach might work to create a binary for android using the android NDK as a cross-compiler and a tool like scratchbox2 or sbrsh to run pieces of code in an Android environment.

Cheers

David