cloudbank/Boost-for-Android

Build and/or simply download the Boost C++ Libraries for the Android platform, with Google's Ndk.

Tested with Boost 1.67.0 and Google's Ndk 17b (current versions as of June 2018).

Works with clang (llvm) - as of ndk 16 google no longer supports gcc.

Creates binaries for multiple abis (armeabi-v7a, x86 ...).

Tested with a development machine running OpenSuse Tumbleweed Linux.

Prebuilt

You can just use the prebuilt binaries if you don't need to customize the build, or don't have access to a unix like development machine.

Build Yourself

Download the boost source and extract to a directory of the form ..../major.minor.patch eg /home/declan/Documents/zone/mid/lib/boost/1.67.1

Note: After the extarction ..../boost/1.67.1 should then be the direct parent dir of "bootstrap.sh", "boost-build.jam" etc

> ls /home/declan/Documents/zone/mid/lib/boost/1.67.1
boost  boost-build.jam  boostcpp.jam  boost.css  boost.png  ....

Clone this repo:

> git clone https://github.com/dec1/Boost-for-Android.git ./boost_for_android

Modify the paths (where the ndk is) and variables (which abis you want to build for, which compiler to use etc) in doIt.sh, and execute it. If the build succeeds then the boost binaries should then be available in the dir boost_for_android/build

> cd boost_for_android
> ./doIt.sh

You may need to have libncurses.so.5 available on you development machine. Install via your os package manager (eg Yast) if necessary.
Note: If for some reason the build fails you may want to manually clear the /tmp/ndk-your_username dir (which gets cleared automatically after a successful build).

Test App

Also included is a test app which can be opened by Android Studio. If you build and run this app it should show the date and time as calculated by boost chrono (indicating that you have built, linked to and called the boost library correctly). To use the test app make sure to adjust the values in the local.properties file.

Note: The test app uses CMake for Android

Header-only Boost Libraries

Many of the boost libraries (eg. algorithm) can be used as "header only" ie do not require compilation . So you may get away with not building boost if you only want to use these. To see which of the libraries do require building you can switch to the dir where you extracted the boost download and call:

> ./bootstrap.sh --show-libraries

which for example with boost 1.67 produces the output:

The Boost libraries requiring separate building and installation are:
    - atomic
    - chrono
    - container
    - context
    - contract
    - coroutine
    - date_time
    - exception
    - fiber
    - filesystem
    - graph
    - graph_parallel
    - iostreams
    - locale
    - log
    - math
    - mpi
    - program_options
    - python
    - random
    - regex
    - serialization
    - signals
    - stacktrace
    - system
    - test
    - thread
    - timer
    - type_erasure
    - wave

Crystax

Crystax is an excellent alternative to Google's Ndk. It ships with prebuilt boost binaries, and dedicated build scripts. These binaries will however not work with Goolge's Ndk. If for some reason you can't or don't want to use Crystax then you can't use their boost binaries or build scripts, which is why this project exists.

Contributions

Many thanks to crystax for their version of build-boost.sh which I adapted to make it work with the google ndk.
Thanks to google for the files dev-defaults.sh, ndk-common.sh, prebuilt-common.sh.
Thanks to Ryan Pavlik for his fork with some improvements.

cloudbank / Boost-for-Android