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Concept
Android Runtime
Summary
Android Runtime (ART) is an application runtime environment used by the Android operating system. Replacing Dalvik, the process virtual machine originally used by Android, ART performs the translation of the application's bytecode into native instructions that are later executed by the device's runtime environment.
Android 2.2 "Froyo" brought trace-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation into Dalvik, optimizing the execution of applications by continually profiling applications each time they run and dynamically compiling frequently executed short segments of their bytecode into native machine code. While Dalvik interprets the rest of an application's bytecode, native execution of those short bytecode segments, called "traces", provides significant performance improvements.
Unlike Dalvik, ART introduces the use of ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation by compiling entire applications into native machine code upon their installation. By eliminating Dalvik's interpretation and trace-based JIT compilation, ART improves the overall execution efficiency and reduces power consumption, which results in improved battery autonomy on mobile devices. At the same time, ART brings faster execution of applications, improved memory allocation and garbage collection (GC) mechanisms, new applications debugging features, and more accurate high-level profiling of applications.
To maintain backward compatibility, ART uses the same input bytecode as Dalvik, supplied through standard .dex files as part of , while the .odex files are replaced with Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) executables. Once an application is compiled by using ART's on-device utility, it is run solely from the compiled ELF executable; as a result, ART eliminates various application execution overheads associated with Dalvik's interpretation and trace-based JIT compilation. A disadvantage of ART is that additional time is required for compilation when an application is installed, and applications take up slightly more secondary storage (usually flash memory) to store the compiled code.
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Related concepts (3)
Dalvik (software)
Dalvik is a discontinued process virtual machine (VM) in the Android operating system that executes applications written for Android. (Dalvik bytecode format is still used as a distribution format, but no longer at runtime in newer Android versions.) Dalvik was an integral part of the Android software stack in the (now unsupported) Android versions 4.4 "KitKat" and earlier, which were commonly used on mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers, and more in some devices such as smart TVs and wearables.
Android (operating system)
Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of developers known as the Open Handset Alliance, though its most widely used version is primarily developed by Google. It was unveiled in November 2007, with the first commercial Android device, the HTC Dream, being launched in September 2008.
Bytecode
Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (normally numeric addresses) that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects. The name bytecode stems from instruction sets that have one-byte opcodes followed by optional parameters.