&gt; Yep, it is easier to make languages target DEX than suffer the pain of the NDK.<p>Why do you say that? Plenty of Android apps use non-trivial amounts of C&#x2F;C++ code, and Dropbox has a tool called Djinni that can automatically generate JNI glue code. My guess is that if it&#x27;s feasible to use pure Dex bytecode, then debugging is easier (because there&#x27;s only one kind of call stack), memory can be managed more effectively (because the Dalvik&#x2F;ART garbage collector can manage everything), and performance isn&#x27;t impacted by the overhead of JNI. But I have nothing to back that up.