Let's forget about dalvik

I guess some of you already know, but just wanted to share this.

Very very cool. I see a lot of developers speculating that this won’t be default until 5.0 though, and I suspect they’re right. In the meantime, I guess you’ll just have to optimize your code. Oh shucks! :stuck_out_tongue:

In fact, we should NOT forget about Dalvik for several years to come.
See http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html , particularly the pie chart indicating market share on the Android appstore. It means that if you distribute via the appstore, you can forget about Froyo and Honeycomb, but Gingerbread with its crappy GC is still more than a quarter of the market and you can’t afford to ignore it.

The good news is that Froyo was superseded in 2011, which means that an Android version does not live longer than two or three years after the introduction of the next version.
Since Gingerbread was superseded just a year later than Froyo, we can hope that it goes to a single-digit percentage and out of relevance within another 12 months. (We could get rid of the object pools and the design constraints towards easing the GC pressure; that would be quite cool.)

Here’s the fastest reasonable (to me) schedule for Dalvik going out of scope:

  • 4.x just started, and will live for at least 1 year, i.e. until end of 2014.
  • So 5.x and (hopefully) ART won’t start before 2010.
  • Plus 2 years for a really fast deprecation of 4.x and Dalvik means 2017.

So I guess forgetting about Dalvik is not an option before 2017, i.e. in three years.

Of course, downloading ART and trying it out should be a high priority for anybody expecting to be more than three years away from a release.

You know the title was intentionally exaggerated to catch the eye, right?
I don’t really think dalvik will disappear tomorrow.
Anyway, that’s good news for us, and java gaming on android in general…

I’m still running 1.6 on my phone…

Anyway, I love the statements below the article saying ‘finally the stuttering is gone’. I have heard it 5 or 6 times already - each time big update to android or hardware appears. And somehow it is managing to magically reappear just before the next update comes…

Well my old 2.1 phone works fine as a alarm clock without anything else I do with it and has no noticeable lags.
Sometimes I feel more generation gap towards my own generation …