News by: Jared Peters 7th November 2013
As we all know from my previous post on ART compiler,The Latest addition in Android 4.4 that could potentially replace Dalvik in the near future. Now we’re getting just a bit more clarification on exactly how ART can improve Android.
Currently, Android uses Dalvik and a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. This means that Android apps are written in a generic version of code, called bytecode, that is only half-compiled by developers. Whenever the apps are launched, Dalvik compiles the code “just in time” to run. While this is a functional solution, it’s not perfect. To fix that, the Android team implemented ART, or Android RunTime, that compiles the bytecode when applications are installed as opposed to compiling them just before being launched. This is called Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiling and is much, much more efficient on performance and battery life.
We’ve already mentioned that activating ART is available in Android 4.4′s developer settings, so it’s clearly not ready for daily use just yet, but early use shows that it has the potential to really cut down on the lag on some devices and cut application startup times in half. For an experimental feature, that’s not bad.
It’s not without downsides, though. ART compiled code would take up slightly more room on a device compared to apps that were only compiled in use, but for most devices, the tradeoff is well worth it. Installing apps will also likely take longer using ART, since they’re compiled on installation. On bigger apps, that could definitely draw out the process a bit, but for most people I feel like the performance gains would be worth it.
