Re: [android-developers] Re: [android-discuss] Unused java hardware acceleration on the G1 (was Re: Android game developers desperately need optimised game engine example code ...)

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:08:46 -0700

I'll bite on this

Stoyan Damov wrote: 
Aha, maybe I wasn't clear enough. I very well understand that Android
runs Dalvik, and not Java bytecode, and from what I read on the net,
this was done to avoid some licensing issues/arguments with Sun.

Here I'll put my question as bluntly as possible:

If Google were not forced by Sun because of WHATEVER to NOT run java
bytecode on the Android, would it be WAY WAY faster for games, apps,
and the Android stack on top of Linux, which is also a Dalvik
bytecode, because of the java hardware acceleration?
Android would not be WAY, WAY faster.  Most of the bottlenecks in Android today are in the hardware (memory bus speed, for graphically intensive games) and in the native-code libraries rather than in the Dalvik byte code interpreter.  Certain applications might be faster, but some might be slower.  This thread prompted me to look at Dan Bornstein's Dalvik presentation, http://tinyurl.com/d4mwz5
which illustrates some significant technical reasons for picking Dalvik over Java regardless of any licensing issues.

(I hadn't known that the target Android platform was so much less capable than the G1)

ARM controls the Jazelle byte-code interpretation technology, and it is certainly in their power to do something similar with Dalvik, but I wouldn't expect to see big gains across the board.  The kind of code that Jazelle speeds up best is probably the kind of code that should be written native anyway (when that is an option for Android).


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