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Google I/O 2008 - Dalvik Virtual Machine Internals

Google for Developers · 187.9K views · 2008-06-03 · 1:01:34

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Overview

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the primary source on Dalvik's dex bytecode, register-based design and memory-saving choices.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2012–2018

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisOperating systems & kernels
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dalvikandroiddex bytecoderegister-based vmgoogle io

What people said

yonran · 2012-05 · Recommendation

Here's Dan Bornstein's talk at Google I/O 2008 about the dex format and the original Dalvik interpreter: [VIDEO] I'm not sure how useful it is in comparing the Dalvik JIT to MonoTouch though.

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jashmatthews · 2018-09 · Reference

There's an experimental branch for Ruby: [LINK] Dalvik also uses a register-based bytecode. The early versions of Android needed a more efficient interpreter. Dan Bornstein's talk: [VIDEO] A classic paper on Register vs Stack VMs: [LINK]

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chubot · 2017-01 · Reference

This is a great post. I like how they walked through all the steps and especially the "perf" tool. Ruby has a patch to do the same thing -- increase sharing by moving reference counts out of the object itself: Index here: [LINK] First post in a long series: [LINK] I think these patches or something similar may have made it into Ruby 2.0: [LINK] [LINK] The Dalvik VM (now replaced by ART) also did this to run on phones with 64 MiB of memory: [VIDEO] I think PHP might do it too. It feels like Python should be doing this as well.

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Sources

Video by Google for Developers, played through YouTube.

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