Android native UI toolkit Jetpack Compose gets version 1.6 update: page scrolling performance improved by 20%, "stable" mark introduced, etc.

IT Home reported on January 29 that Google recently launched version 1.6 for the Android native UI toolkit Jetpack Compose. This version mainly improves performance and is said to have significant improvements in "page scrolling performance" and "startup speed". In addition, Google also introduced a "stable" flag for the Compose compiler and made improvements in fonts.

IT Home noticed that researchers have improved the memory allocation and lazy initialization capabilities of Jetpack Composed, thereby providing effective performance improvements for all APIs of the Compose compiler. Users can see visible performance improvements in APIs such as "text", "clickable elements", and "lazy loading lists".

Officials claim that the performance of Jetpack Compose 1.6 has been comprehensively improved , claiming that "page scrolling performance has increased by 20%. The startup time has been shortened by about 12%" , allowing users to develop more smoothly.

In addition, Google has added a labeling option called "stable" to the Compose compiler, allowing users to mark any class or library as "stable" . It is said that without sacrificing developer flexibility, the Compose compiler can intelligently determine when the UI needs to be reassembled (automatically refreshed) through marking, thereby improving application performance.

Google also said that the code generated by the Compose compiler plugin has also been improved. Because the Compose compiler tracks the state object of Compose to determine which items need to be reassembled when the state value changes.

However, Google mentioned that many of the state values ​​in the above content will only be read once, and some state values ​​have never been read, but they will still be frequently tracked and reorganized, resulting in performance loss . Therefore, Google introduced a feature called Intrinsic Remember, which claims to be able to record the remember function of the state object, so as to reorganize only "the items that should be reorganized" and avoid unnecessary re-rendering.

In addition to performance updates, Google has also improved the default font padding capabilities of Jetpack Compose, turning off the outdated includeFontPadding character spacing property by default, making the text layout "more in line with design specifications."

▲ Image source: Google official press release (the same below)

The UI toolkit also supports non-linear font scaling to improve text readability and accessibility; and introduces platform-level drag and drop capabilities , allowing users to drag file contents from one application to another, which is somewhat similar to Hammer's OneStep and Honor's Anywhere Door function.