By Ryan Paul
June 26, 2009 3:03 PM CT

Google has launched a new native development toolkit for Android that will make it possible for third-party Android application developers to use C and C++. Google has also released an Android scripting environment that supports Python and Lua.

Google's open source Android operating system is maturing and beginning to attract a more diverse audience of third-party developers. To accommodate the growing need for more power and flexibility, Google is opening up the platform to additional programming languages and new kinds of development. The Android userspace is largely dominated by Java technologies that run on top of Google's custom Dalvik Java virtual machine.

At launch, Java was the only officially supported programming language for building distributable third-party Android software. That's starting to change as Google introduces new options. On Thursday, the company announced the availability of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) which will allow developers to build Android software components with C and C++. The NDK will enable developers to code some of the performance-sensitive parts of their programs in C and reuse existing C code on the Android platform.

It comes with some limitations, however, and is not intended to serve as a full alternative to Android's Java development model. The NDK does not provide access to platform framework APIs. It's intended to be used alongside Java to code individual parts of programs that require existing C libraries or higher performance. JNI is used as the bridge between Java and native code. The NDK includes a cross-compiler toolchain for generating ARM binaries that can be deployed in Android APK packages.