A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L

Re:A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L by Zigurd on Saturday July 05, 2014 @10:11AM (#7991889)

I do not think dynamic DEX generation and loading was ever possible with Dalvik. So ART makes this no more or less difficult. An Android runtime environment, by definition, includes all the code to interpret DEX, even if it isn't made to be capable of using dynamically generated DEX.

But you have other problems to solve: How are you going to generate DEX? Generate java bytecode and bring dx to the runtime? Make jruby emit DEX directly?

EDIT: As per the comment below, that is how it's done. You generate Java bytecode and run dx on it.

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Re:A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L by daniel_solano on Saturday July 05, 2014 @11:24AM (#7992076)

It is entirely possible to dynamically generate and load DEX files in Dalvik, and it should be possible in ART.

To the best of my knowledge, there are too projects for generating Dex bytecode directly:

1. dexmaker https://code.google.com/p/dexmaker/ 2. ASMDEX http://asm.ow2.org/asmdex-index.html

A different approach, which I used for Clojure/Android, is to generate JVM bytecode and then use a bundled dx tool to generate Dalvik bytecode from that.

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