A revolutionary breakthrough in Android performance? A detailed explanation of the technical principles of Huawei's Ark Compiler

At the Huawei P30 series domestic launch conference, Richard Yu announced the Huawei Ark Compiler and called it a "revolutionary breakthrough in Android performance." Dr. Wang Chenglu of Huawei explained the principles of the Ark Compiler, saying that Huawei has created a compilation team since 2009, during which time it launched its own compiler HCC, programming language CM, and now the Ark Compiler. The compiler translates the high-level language used by programmers into machine code that machines can understand, so that mobile phones can understand and execute human instructions.

The existing Android system is mainly compiled on the phone, and some programs will be converted while executing, which affects the efficiency of program execution. However, the Ark compiler is different. It is the industry's first multi-language joint optimization compiler. Developers can compile multiple languages ​​into a set of machine codes at one time in the development environment. There is no need to generate extra consumption caused by cross-language during operation. It also performs cross-language joint optimization, thereby improving operating efficiency.

Moreover, the Ark compiler can complete the compilation of all codes in the development environment, and the mobile phone does not need to rely on virtual machine resources after installing the application.

Memory recycling is also different from Android's centralized recycling. Android needs to suspend the application when recycling memory globally, while the Ark compiler does not need to suspend the application when recycling, and can recycle at any time.

The Ark compiler is compiled during the application development stage, so different applications can be allowed to adopt different compilation optimization schemes. In addition, compilation in the development environment will not be limited by the performance of the mobile phone, and more advanced optimization algorithms can be used to optimize each application.

***, Dr. Wang Chenglu said that Huawei's Ark Compiler will be fully open source starting in 2019, inviting the entire industry and ecosystem to pay attention to and improve the Android performance experience together.