Koushik Dutta is Bringing C#, Ruby, and Python to Google’s Android

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Feb 18, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

Python ,

Ruby ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Mono ,

Android ,

Languages ,

.NET ,

Programming ,

Mobile ,

Operating Systems

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Koushik Dutta has reached a major milestone in his effort to support C# and Python on Google’s mobile phone platform, Android. Starting with Mono as a base, he has created bridges that allow Java code written for Dalvik to call into Mono code. Likewise, Mono code written in C# or IronPython can now call back into Dalvik code.

Currently the syntax for C# is a bit verbose, but that should improve once Mono adds support for the new C# keyword “dynamic”. Variables with the type dynamic can use custom binders to determine how to call a method at runtime, which would fit well with interop scenarios such as this.

Another important development from this project is the ability to run Python and Ruby applications on the Android. Since this project is based on Mono, it brings with it support for the Dynamic Language Runtime and the language implementations IronPython and IronRuby.

You can see the examples and source code on Koushik Dutta’s blog.