Going Deeper With Android 2.2’s JIT Compiler
Before the official Froyo announcement at I/O, we’d learned that an Adobe employee’s phone was running at ridiculously high speeds. Most outlets quickly chalked this up to the possibility that Google implemented a Just-In-Time compiler for their Dalvik Virtual Machine.
Sure enough, they confirmed our suspicions at the keynote in San Francisco, and we even got a taste of real-world performance (there’s no “theoretical” performance hikes here, folks). We know what JIT does, but I’m sure there are a lot of non-developers out there that can’t understand how it’s able to provide the huge bump in performance for Dalvik.
Technical lead for Android’s Dalvik team – Dan Bornstein – signed in with a blog post over at the Android developers site going into a bit more details about what’s really going on beneath the hood to significantly improve performance of Android (in certain cases) without needing to touch the hardware. Thankfully, he puts it in plain English so you can get – at the least – a pretty basic understanding of what’s going on. Head over there now if you want to learn more about what makes your Froyo so sweet.