OpenCV, android, java, C++, suckage

So I needed to code up a prototype and I thought it was probably time to use OpenCV rather than write it all from scratch again, since I didn't need OpenCL at this time. I've always avoided OpenCV because the code within it is horrid, the API a bit ugly, and it's almost impossible to build it without the right version of GNU/linux (let alone for another platform).

I think I probably made a mistake here ... because I'm not sure much has changed, or if it has it's only for the worse.

First I was just using the android api - i thought that the same api was available to java generally, but it's pretty hard to find out if that's true. The only README just points to a generic web page, and who knows what cmake is doing to decide it wont build anything Java. Although I have some stuff working on android I wanted to drop back to the desktop to ease some experimentation I need to do.

cmake - boy that sucks total arse. When it does work there is no information on how to control it (e.g. why does it say Unavailable: java), and it's just a shitty piece of crap anyway.

And so does C++. C++ is such a shit language.

OpenCV on android is just slow as fuck anyway. Just a simple live webcam can barely hit 10fps without even doing anything. Changing the camera resolution barely makes much difference, so there's something funky going on. There's so much debug snot in `logcat' that you can't even tell what you're own application is doing let alone OpenCV.

The Java API is really pretty horrible anyway. Everything seems to go through an opaque type 'Mat', but then you still need to know what's in it. It seems to be because the C++ API is also horrible. It's kind of like they're trying to make it "matlab for C++", which probably makes sense for their target audience of non-programmers, but otherwise it totally sucks.

I would have been better off just coding up the routines I need from scratch (I already had to do one of them as it was a contrib api which isn't exposed, and I couldn't get custom jni to work to bind it), as they're fairly simple and easy to use once you give them a decent api.

(Yes I could use JavaCV but it still brings along with it a lot of the hassles, and the library it uses is still the same).