WasmAndroid: A Cross-Platform Runtime for Native Programming Languages on Android

Abstract

Open source hardware such as RISC-V has been gaining substantial momentum. Recently, they have begun to embrace Google’s Android operating system to leverage its software ecosystem. Despite the encouraging progress, a challenging issue arises: a majority of Android applications are written in native languages and need to be recompiled to target new hardware platforms. Unfortunately, this recompilation process is not scalable because of the explosion of new hardware platforms. To address this issue, we present WasmAndroid, a high-performance cross-platform runtime for native Android applications. With WasmAndroid, developers can compile their source code to WebAssembly, an efficient and portable bytecode format that can be executed everywhere without additional reconfiguration. Developers can also transpile existing application binaries to WebAssembly when source code is not available. WebAssembly’s language model is very different from other common languages. This mismatch leads to many unique implementation challenges. In this article, we provide workable solutions and conduct a thorough system evaluation. We show that WasmAndroid provides acceptable performance to execute native applications in a cross-platform manner.