Zig - Apk
init { System.loadLibrary("filter") } private external fun apply_grayscale(pixels: ByteArray, len: Int)
// filter.zig export fn apply_grayscale(pixels: [*]u8, len: usize) void { var i: usize = 0; while (i < len) i += 4 : { const r = pixels[i]; const g = pixels[i+1]; const b = pixels[i+2]; const gray = @as(u8, (0.299 * @as(f32, r) + 0.587 * @as(f32, g) + 0.114 * @as(f32, b))); pixels[i] = gray; pixels[i+1] = gray; pixels[i+2] = gray; } } Then he compiled for Android (ARM64) with a single command: zig apk
zig build-lib -target aarch64-linux-android -dynamic filter.zig This produced libfilter.so . No cross-compilation toolchain installation, no Android NDK setup — just Zig. He placed the .so into app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a/ . In his Android app (Kotlin), he loaded it: init { System
Here’s a useful story about — a fictional but practical example of how someone might use Zig to build an Android package. The Story: Speeding Up a Mobile Game with Zig Meet Arjun , an indie game developer. He’d built a 2D puzzle game for Android using Unity, but the game had a problem: on older devices, the physics and tile rendering lagged badly. Profiling showed the bottleneck was a custom image-processing filter written in Java — too slow for real-time use. In his Android app (Kotlin), he loaded it: