Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications that require direct access to system resources. NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn allows a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. This is a hands-on guide to extending your game development skills with Android NDK. The book takes you through many clear, step-by-step example applications to help you further explore the features of Android NDK and some popular C++ libraries and boost your productivity by debugging the development process. Through the course of this book, you will learn how to write portable multi-threaded native code, use HTTP networking in C++, play audio files, use OpenGL ES 3, and render high-quality text. Each chapter aims to take you one step closer to building your application. By the end of this book, you will be able to create an engaging, complete gaming application.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Intrusive smart pointers


Tracking all native memory allocations in a multithreaded environment is notoriously difficult process, especially when it comes to passing objects ownership between different threads. In C++, memory management can be automated using smart pointers. The standard std::shared_ptr class is a good place to start with. However, we want to focus on more interesting and lightweight techniques. We will not use the Boost library either, since we really want to stay lean when it comes to compile times.

Note

The recent versions of the Android NDK support the C++ 11 Standard Library in full. If you feel more comfortable with std::shared_ptr or intrusive pointers from Boost, feel free to use smart pointers from those libraries.

In an intrusive smart pointer, as the name suggests, a reference counter is embedded into the object. The simplest way to do this is by inheriting from the following base class:

class iIntrusiveCounter
{
private:
  std::atomic<long> m_RefCounter;
public...