Myriad brings 3x Faster Applications With New VM To Android

myriadgroup.com

15 points·enki··9 comments

Claim Posted on Internet, No Proof Supplied.

(download links? specs? papers? anything? bueller?)

The customers for this are phone vendors, who will be getting one-on-one sales pitches. They don't really need to convince you.

Then why post it here? "It could exist in a future phone at some point, it doesn't involve you. But here's a link, for you to read." If I shouldn't care, then why should I care?

Well I know it doesn't necessarily mean anything but Benoit Schillings (of BeOS and Qt fame) is their CTO, and by all accounts he knows a bit about coding. Which, while not proof of anything in it self, at least shows they at least in theory have the chops to pull something like that off and probably aren't completely making shit up.

It's interesting that Google has a JS JIT but not a Dalvik JIT; I'd think it would be simpler.

Edit: I see they're working on it (although still in secret): http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Android-s-Dalvik-to-b...

They are working on it. Android 2.5 is supposed to have it.

Maybe because of memory constraints. JIT output can take quite a bit of memory. Furthermore JITting stuff to aggressively can significantly increase startup time of apps; for desktop/GUI apps it's usually better to apply Just-Too-Late compilation: don't JIT things early but JIT things later after the app is already running.

For a relatively constrained device like an Android handset, I'd have thought it would be better to compile the bytecodes into an optimised native executable at installation time?

If the native executable is larger than bytecode, no. Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to compare dex vs. Thumb2 code size.

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