Does this noticeably improve build times and general smoothness? Because that's been the major problem with Android Studio.
yes, the newish build model is modular, allowing to only compile what needs to. Still not perfect but a huge improvement.
>general smoothness
Just as before, give enough ram to AS. Generally if it is slow it is because it is constantly trashing the memory.
Hmm; I have been running extremely large projects on AS with a good but not out of this world machine.
Compilation times are too slow for my taste (ie even clean should take less than 5 seconds ideally), but the IDE itself is pretty smooth.
Again, the trick is to monitor its memory usage. It is a pity that it's up to the user to configure this, but for large projects I had to allocate more memory to AS and it makes it go from unusable to lag free.
No, no, your English is fine, it's AS that's the problem. :-) I assumed that it was probably a typo of some sort, but I would truly have believed either usage. Though AS has gotten better about not trashing memory.
That said, I agree that with a properly provisioned machine, AS does well. And it's a vast improvement over its predecessor.
Unfortunately those changes do mean a few breaking changes for build.gradle files.