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back to article Meet Jack and Jill: Google’s new Android compilers

Google has come up with new Android compilers, spotted in the latest preview SDK by Eric Lafortune at Saikoa. The compilers are in the Android SDK 21.1 and are currently called jack.jar and jill.jar. They are not enabled by default, but require the directive “useJack true” in the configuration file for the gradle build tool. …

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  1. Longrod_von_Hugendong
    FAIL

    Not not mention...

    (Downvotes at the ready :D)

    What else Jacking and Jilling something means...

    Andriod always seems wa*ky to me, so maybe it ok.

    1 0 Reply
    1. handle
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not not mention...

      "Jill forgot to take the pill and now they've got a daughter"

      1 0 Reply
      1. Christoph
        Reply Icon

        Re: Not not mention...

        Jill came down with half-a-crown

        But not for fetching water

        1 0 Reply
  2. Whitter
    Trollface

    Rhymes eh?

    Jack is nimble,

    Jack is quick,

    But Jill prefers a candlestick.

    9 0 Reply
  3. TRT Silver badge

    Broken code...

    can be mended with a software patch comprised of vinegar and brown paper?

    4 0 Reply
  4. DaveMcM

    So just me who went with the Jack and Jill male and female donkey association then.

    Not quite sure what that might mean, but it's there...

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Google are American where the donkey is a political symbol .. clearly this is the elephant in the room!

      2 0 Reply
  5. tony2heads
    Unhappy

    Jack and Jill

    I remember those books at infants school

    Shows my age...

    1 3 Reply
    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Jack and Jill

      We had Janet & John. And boy were they dull...

      I suspect my reading was only rescued by Willard Price's animal Adventure books. Hal & Roger are exploited by their parents as cheap (and very under-aged) labour in very dangerous jobs. But instead of going to social services, end up populating their father's zoo with animals, while avoiding kidnappers, murderers, or just getting eaten.

      3 0 Reply
      1. TRT Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Jack and Jill

        Ah yes. Janet and John start coding.

        "Define Spot

        C:\spot.go

        Fetch (the ball)

        Run, Spot, Run."

        6 0 Reply
      2. asdf
        Reply Icon
        Trollface

        Re: Jack and Jill

        >I suspect my reading was only rescued by Willard Price's animal Adventure books.

        I had the same problem later in life buy mine was rescued by Heart of Darkness, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1984 and Animal Farm. Uplifting book they were.

        1 0 Reply
  6. auburnman

    "bypassing Oracle’s compiler"

    Were Oracle the ones suing Google over Android a while back? Colour me surprised that big G are positioning to stop using their wares.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: "bypassing Oracle’s compiler"

      That's be the case for a while. There's a tombstone with "ART STANTON" written on it.

      Wouldn't it be funny if Google now embraced .NET as well!

      0 0 Reply
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Optimisation?

    Something has to be done with the horrible performance in lollipop (5.0). Maybe optimising compilers can help.

    0 2 Reply
    1. DrXym
      Reply Icon

      Re: Optimisation?

      Lollipop defaults to use ART which does ahead of time compilation on apps. So it already happens. If there are performance issues it is likely nothing to do with the apps and more likely to do with the services they hit, or the kernel in some way (scheduler, IO etc.)

      ART should and (does in my experience) result in faster application performance. Instead compiling the dalvik byte code when the app launches, it's already compiled so the app launches faster and is already running natively. Aside from being faster it saves battery because compilation is a 1-shot process instead of every time the app is launched from cold.

      2 0 Reply
    2. RankingRoger
      Reply Icon

      Re: Optimisation?

      Blistering performance here on my 13 month old Nexus5.

      Perhaps you bought a crap Nexus7 2012 model?

      1 1 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps if Android used native binaries rather than a VM...

    ... smartphone batteries might last a bit longer. Yeah I know, different CPUs etc, but it should at least be an option to compile to native-cpu-of-your-choice. You can bet Googles own apps - eg Chrome - arn't written in Java.

    0 3 Reply
    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Perhaps if Android used native binaries rather than a VM...

      To all intents and purposes they are all native apps now, with ART the bytecode is compiled on installation.

      4 1 Reply
      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Perhaps if Android used native binaries rather than a VM...

        They are native binaries but that's not quite the same as what you might get with entirely native code – it depends on how good the ART compiler is – this is the sort of thing that Intel has to deal with for apps that won't run on Android x86.

        0 0 Reply
  9. Yorkshen

    it is fine, untill it gets awkward.

    Can we finally get a tool which is 3rd party applications friendly ?

    0 0 Reply

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