Ion

Ion is a portable suite of libraries and tools for building client applications, especially graphical ones. It is small, fast, robust, and is cross-platform across many platforms and devices, including desktops, mobile devices, browsers, and other embedded platforms.

For more details and a fair amount of documentation see https://google.github.io/ion.

Why Use Ion?

• Small: < 500k binary size on mobile platforms, often much smaller
• Powerful: Tools for faster productivity when developing applications
  • Robust, portable application infrastructure aids in:
  • Object lifetime management
  • Memory allocation
  • Application start-up and static instances
  • Threading
  • Run-time setting editing
  • Automatic performance instrumentation
  • More!
• Tools for graphics:
  • Analyze graphics scenes to find performance bottleneck
  • Trace all OpenGL calls and examine their arguments
  • Use scene resources in multiple contexts, automatically
  • Run-time graphics state introspection
  • Run-time shader editing: change your shaders and immediately see the results
• Fast graphics: Minimal overhead between your application and OpenGL / ES
• Tested: Well-tested and facilitates testing your application
  • ~100% test coverage
  • Black- and white-box tested, unit tests and integration tests
  • Mock implementation of OpenGL API allows direct renderer unit tests and validation
  • Integrated Remote: extensible API allows changing arbitrary application settings on-the-fly for faster development, testing, and debugging
• Cross-platform:
  • Desktop: Linux, Mac OSX, Windows (OpenGL)
  • Handheld: Android (ARM, x86 MIPS), iOS (ARM and x86), and their 64-bit variants
  • Browser: Emscripten/asm.js, NaCl / pNaCl
• Cross-functional
  • Used by many teams across Google, running on billions of devices through multiple Google products

NOTE: This is not an official Google product.