What' s the difference between gnustl and stlport in android ndk development?

Question

I want to know if their performance/stability differ from each other and their licenses explained in short. Real world experiences are welcomed.

Answer 1

As of yesterday (NDK r9d), gnustl was still more comprehensive, e.g. support for <thread>, <future>, and some other C++11 features. Even these depend on the toolchain: you could not use the default ARM gcc 4.6 to have them enabled.

OTOH, stlport license is no-nonsense free, like the rest of AOSP, while the linking exception to GPL v3 for gnustl is not easy to understand. See https://groups.google.com/d/topic/android-ndk/OWl_orR0DRQ for some older discussion.

If you look at the NDK release notes, you will find that in terms of fixed bugs these two STL implementations were more or less on par.

I would be glad to see performance benchmarks, but personally I have never encountered a situation where STL implementation variation resolved a real bottleneck.