Google I/O is first and foremost a developer conference. New products may be announced at the keynote, but just about everything is really meant for the people that build the apps. For Android developers, there are few things that matter more than their tools. Today, a fresh release of Android Studio hit the Canary channel, and it brings one of the most often requested features: C/C++ support.

Android apps, as most people think of them, are usually written in Java and have a runtime environment that imposes some additional overhead on execution. Games and other performance-critical software are usually built with C or C++ and the Native Development Kit (NDK) so that they can avoid most of that overhead.

The new capability comes care of JetBrains Clion (pronounced "sea-lion"), a product already dedicated to C/C++ development. Of course, JetBrains is also the developer responsible for IntelliJ, the IDE Android Studio is based on.

Both editing and debugging are supported, along with many advanced features like code completion and refactoring. Since most of the functionality comes directly from an existing product, the feature set is already quite extensive. A more detailed talk along with demonstrations was held today at Google I/O during the "What's New In Android Development Tools" session.