Google previews next version of Android, codenamed “L release”

Move over KitKat, a new version of Android is coming.

Read the whole story

 

[sk3l]

lewax00[/url]":u42jg78c]AOT compilation...also know as just compilation. Welcome to the Gentoo model?

Yes, but Gentoo's major benefit is that it also offers the "aggressive hardware optimization" option that was touted as part of JIT, so it's a slightly different paradigm.

 

[sk3l]

BoogieWonderland[/url]":3fk0kq8f]

sk3l[/url]":3fk0kq8f]

lewax00[/url]":3fk0kq8f]AOT compilation...also know as just compilation. Welcome to the Gentoo model?

Yes, but Gentoo's major benefit is that it also offers the "aggressive hardware optimization" option that was touted as part of JIT, so it's a slightly different paradigm.

From reading the article, I'd say that apps are compiled after downloading, optimizing for your hardware, so it seems to me as exactly the same paradigm as Gentoo. With the slight difference that in Gentoo you compile from source, while with ART you compile the Java bytecode.

AFAIK AOT typically does not involve performing any hardware-specific tuning.

From the article:

Traditionally, JIT takes longer to start up but can be more aggressively optimized because it has information about the device it is running on. AOT will start up faster, but it usually has less information about the hardware it's running on.

Gentoo's optimizations are like those attributed to JIT, i.e. hardware-specific. You can actually tune the compiler based on the footprint of the processor, registers, cache and its instruction set.

With AOT, the compilation target is presumably not manipulated in such a fine-grained manner. It's just like compiling std C++. It will be portable, but may not take advantage of all the bells and whistles of the underlying hardware.

 

[sk3l]

I went back & re-read the article, after seeing it touched on here in the comments, particularly the part mentioning that the Google-fied implementation of AOT (ART or whatever) does actually produce a compilation output, from source, using the hardware profile of the target machine. So, I'll have to retract what I said earlier rebutting the comparison between this ART and Gentoo. They do appear to have similarities when it comes to their manner of optimization.