If they can build Android apps, why cant they build desktop Linux apps? Or is it...

AlexeyBrin · on April 24, 2015

You are confusing Android with desktop Linux, very different beasts. Just try to open/create a graphical window on a typical Linux distro, after that try to create a simple app on Android and you will understand.

frozenport · on April 24, 2015

As a practical matter they are quite different, but this is mostly a linking problem. Both use ELF.

AlexeyBrin · on April 24, 2015

And very different UIs. If by desktop Linux you meant text based programs (no GUIs) than I think, at least technically, it should be possible to use a cross compiler toolchain (based on Clang) from VS 2015.

chetanahuja · on April 25, 2015

You can run an entire debian distro in a chroot environment in Android. I have done it. Works fine for cli stuff.

http://sven-ola.dyndns.org/repo/debian-kit-en.html

Sanddancer · on April 25, 2015

You'd have to make sure you statically link the program, because android uses a different libc than most other linux distros.

ori_b · on April 25, 2015

Or you point the linker at a different libc.

I think the question isn't so much "Can I make VSC++ Android apps run on Linux" so much as "Can I futz around with linker flags, and get a desktop binary if I point it to the right runtime, start files, and so on?"