Incidentally, Visual Studio and KDevelop are native code, and they take a while to load too. Could it be that big bloated apps are big and bloated, VM or not?
Given that many phone apps are going to be started, looked at and shut down within a few seconds I don't think the comment is completely out of line.
for example dalvik bytecode can be adapted to match host endianness after being installed
Running JVM bytecode which is designed to be big-endian (sparc was big-endian) requires some adaptation when executed (especially when constants are loaded from the constants pool) on little endian machines (x84), it seems that the JIT compiler takes care of it. However I don't know how much does this inpact on the JIT compilation speed.
furthermore dalvik wasn't even a jit until android 2.2.
I assume that this startup latency issue was taken into heavy consideration when designing the dalvik JIT, can anyone point to any resources about this?
Yes, you can argue that in some cases, you can get about a 2x speedup with native code, or more by using hardware features not exposed in java (stream processing), but that's not relevant to the argument this guy appears to be making.