Explain Ravenwood project relationships

[eugene-krivobokov]

Hi! There is Ravenwood project: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/ravenwood

It seems to aim to be a partial or complete alternative to Robolectric. It'd be nice to shed some light regarding it from Robolectric side.

[hoisie]

Hi @eugene-krivobokov,

disclaimer - I am not on the Android platform team, so I cannot speak on behalf of them :)

I think the Ravenwood README.md provides a good overview and comparison to Robolectric (the italicized parts). If you read the doc, you can see the criticism of Robolectric, and why it has historically not been sanctioned for use within the Android platform sources.

Although the Android platform wants to experiment with hostside testing for increased performance, Robolectric unfortunately has a lot of legacy shadows and a lot legacy design constraints that the Android platform doesn't necessarily want to inherit.

I believe Ravenwood is a greenfield project that allows the benefits of hostside testing for Android platform sources, but is highly tuned to the needs of the Android platform teams, and is highly integrated into their development tooling and organizational structure.

I am personally happy to see the Ravenwood project, as it will help to ensure that the Android framework will continue to work on the JVM, and there may be opportunities to collaborate (i.e. improve support for libandroid_runtime (graphics, sqlite, etc..) on host, standardized bytecode instrumentation, etc..).

We are still investing a lot into Robolectric as it is more targeted for Android app developers.