Android Studio for Platform

So this is for platform developers, developing Android itself (not apps).

The intro video says it's the existing Android Studio app, plus a powerful plugin. They say the main addition is good support for the Soong Build System. Which I had not heard of. From the linked docs:

The Soong build system was introduced in Android 7.0 (Nougat) to replace Make. It leverages the Kati GNU Make clone tool and Ninja build system component to speed up builds of Android.

https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build

Hope this helps. TIL. I had heard of Ninja, which has a good reputation as a build tool.

This is a much-improved development experience over AIDEgen [0] and it's predecessor, idegen [1], or even before that just using Vim.

0: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/asuite/+/ref...

1: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/development/+/mast...

This looks really interesting. idegen was difficult to work with and would bake the entire aosp repo (hundred's of sub repos and modules) into a single Android Studio project. Debugging required extra setup and symbol and definition lookup was flaky at best for java and I believe non-existent for cpp.

Issue for me is that I don't find Linux to be a pleasant env for Android Studio work (coming from dev on a Mac), especially when working with emulators although i've never tried cloud emulators before so I may give that another go.