mallet can not be used in android about mallet

[mimno]

It looks like java.util.UUID might be a good replacement. If someone could suggest a fix and a way to test it on Android and regular JVMs, that would be great!

[hao-fu]

Same issue.

[joshhansen]

I've just run into this, too. Does anybody know where in Mallet the VMID class gets used? Maybe we could replace it?

[joshhansen]

The obvious search I should have already done: https://github.com/mimno/Mallet/search?q=VMID&type=Code

Looks like it's used in Alphabet, Pipe, and PagedInstanceList

[joshhansen]

I committed a switch from java.rmi.dgc.VMID to java.util.UUID on my fork, https://github.com/joshhansen/Mallet

It compiles and doesn't seem to affect the number of tests passing, but I can't necessarily vouch that it's doing the right thing.

As for testing Android compatibility automatically, I'm not aware of a method myself but I put up a Stackoverflow question that has one response already: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51310507/how-to-run-junit-tests-in-an-android-runtime

I want to add that the recent change of compile target from 1.6 to 1.8 could introduce some issues for Android since support for Java 8 appears to be partial and only in the most recent Android versions. 1.7 would be safer as it's been fully supported since Android 5.

[mimno]

The changes in your fork look good, could you submit a pull request? (Thanks!)

We currently use very few 1.8 features, I'm upgrading mostly because it's been out for four years now. Is the issue that android will reject packages compiled against 1.8 or that it will choke on specific features?

[joshhansen]

PR submitted.

With current build tools (Android Studio 3.0+ and recent versions of Gradle) you can depend on Java 8-based libraries as long as they don't use features unsupported by your targeted Android API version. Right now the default API version is 19 which targets around 90% of devices. Many of the most useful Java 8 features require API version 24 which only has about 8% device support. There's a table here that details this.

So you can set your Maven source and target levels to 1.8, but you'd have to be careful to ensure that you never use unsupported features, at least to the extent that you want to support Android.

[mimno]

Thanks! I couldn't find any problems with it, but it's possible there could be odd bugs in multithreaded environments.

That sounds good about Android. I'm much more excited about supporting mobile devices than 1.8!

[joshhansen]

Yeah, lots of potential on mobile! Thanks for your help on this.