Changelog

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For Android Studio issues, follow the docs on the Android Studio site.

Announcements

• GCC is no longer supported. It will be removed in NDK r18.

• libc++ is now the default STL for CMake and standalone toolchains. If you manually selected a different STL, we strongly encourage you to move to libc++. Note that ndk-build still defaults to no STL. For more details, see this blog post.

• gnustl, gabi++, and stlport have been removed.

• Support for ARMv5 (armeabi), MIPS, and MIPS64 has been removed. Attempting to build any of these ABIs will result in an error.

• Support for ICS (android-14 and android-15) has been removed. Apps using executables no longer need to provide both a PIE and non-PIE executable.

• The Play Store will require 64-bit support when uploading an APK beginning in August 2019. Start porting now to avoid surprises when the time comes. For more information, see this blog post.

Changes

• Updated Clang to build 4691093, based on r316199.
  • Issue 313: LTO now works on Windows.
  • Issue 527: Undefined Behavior Sanitizer now works for NDK binaries.
  • Issue 593: Clang now automatically passes --eh-frame-hdr to the linker even for static executables, fixing exception handling.
• Updated gtest to upstream revision 0fe96607d85cf3a25ac40da369db62bbee2939a5.
• libandroid_support is no longer used when your NDK API level is greater than or equal to 21 (Lollipop). Build system maintainers: be sure to update your build systems to account for this.
• The platform static libraries (libc.a, libm.a, etc.) have been updated.
  • All NDK platforms now contain a modern version of these static libraries. Previously they were all Gingerbread (perhaps even older) or Lollipop.
  • Prior NDKs could not use the static libraries with a modern NDK API level because of symbol collisions between libc.a and libandroid_support. This has been solved by removing libandroid_support for modern API levels. A side effect of this is that you must now target at least android-21 to use the static libraries, but these binaries will still work on older devices.
• Fixed parsing of the NDK revision in CMake. NDK version information is now available in the following CMake variables:
  • ANDROID_NDK_REVISION: The full string in the source.properties file.
  • ANDROID_NDK_MAJOR: The major revision of the NDK. For example: the 16 in r16b.
  • ANDROID_NDK_MINOR: The minor revision of the NDK. For example: the b (represented as 1) in r16b.
  • ANDROID_NDK_BUILD: The build number of the NDK. This is 0 in the case of a local development build.
  • ANDROID_NDK_BETA: The beta version of the NDK. This is 0 for a stable release.
• Added support for APP_WRAP_SH to ndk-build.
  • This variable points to a shell script (relative to your Android.mk) that will be installed as a wrap.sh file in your APK.
  • Available in both an ABI-generic form (APP_WRAP_SH), which will install a single script for every ABI, and an ABI-specific form (APP_WRAP_SH_arm64-v8a, etc) to allow for per-ABI customization of the wrap.sh script.
• Issue 540: ndk-build now installs sanitizer runtime libraries to your out directory for inclusion in your APK. Coupled with wrap.sh, this removes the requirement of rooting your device to use sanitizers.
• When using ASAN, ndk-build will install a wrap.sh file to set up ASAN for your app if you have not specified your own wrap.sh. If you have specified your own wrap.sh, you can add ASAN support to it as described here.
• Issue 614: ndk-build and CMake no longer pass -fno-integrated-as for arm32 by default. If your project contains hand written assembly, you may need to pass this flag.
• Added support for clang-tidy to ndk-build. * Enable application-wide with APP_CLANG_TIDY := true, or per-module with LOCAL_CLANG_TIDY := true. * Pass specific clang-tidy flags such as -checks with APP_CLANG_TIDY_FLAGS or LOCAL_CLANG_TIDY_FLAGS. * As usual, module settings override application settings. * By default no flags are passed to clang-tidy, so only the checks enabled by default in clang-tidy will be enabled. View the default list with clang-tidy -list-checks. * By default clang-tidy warnings are not errors. This behavior can be changed with -warnings-as-errors=*.

Known Issues

• This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all outstanding bugs.
• Issue 360: thread_local variables with non-trivial destructors will cause segfaults if the containing library is dlcloseed on devices running M or newer, or devices before M when using a static STL. The simple workaround is to not call dlclose.
• Issue 70838247: Gold emits broken debug information for AArch64. AArch64 still uses BFD by default.