Question

I am currently writing a paper on the Android platform. After some research, it’s clear that Dalvik has room for improvement. I was wondering, what do you think would be the best use of a developer’s time with this goal?

JIT compilation seems like the big one, but then i’ve also heard this would be of limited use on such a low resource machine. Does anyone have a resource or data that backs this up?

Are there any other options that should be considered? Aside from developing a robust native development kit to bypass the VM.

For those who are interested, there is a lecture that has been recorded and put online regarding the Dalvik VM.

Any thoughts welcome, as this question appears subjective i’ll clarify that the answer I’ll accept must have some justification for proposed changes. Any data to back it up, such as the improvement in the Sun JVM when it was introduced, would be a massive plus.

Answer 1

1. Better garbage collection: compacting at minimum (to eliminate memory fragmentation problems experienced today), ideally less CPU intensive at doing the collection itself (to reduce the “my game frame rates suck” complaints)
2. JIT, as you cite
3. Enough documentation that, when coupled with an NDK, somebody sufficiently crazy could compile Dalvik bytecode to native code for an AOT compilation option
4. Make it separable from Android itself, such that other projects might experiment with it and community contributions might arrive in greater quantity and at a faster clip

I’m sure I could come up other ideas if you need them.