The implications being that D8 could compile to DEX in 30% less time and produce smaller DEX files than DX. In 2017, Google announced D8 as a DEX compiler that was rewritten from the ground up to perform many of these steps at once. Google recognized the performance implications of having to run several different tools to generate DEX files.

We can now start to see why “build performance” is a recurring concern for all Android developers. DX finally converts all compiled Java code to Android DEX format.ProGuard may run to strip out unused Java code and make optimizations.desugar may need to run, in order to enable Java 8 features on Android.If we dive deeper into how Java code is compiled, the following steps produce the final DEX file for an Android app: dll files reside in an assemblies directory in the APK.Īnd this is just code! There is, of course, even more stuff in your APK such as layout files, image resources, assets, etc. Java code: in an Android-specific DEX (Dalvik-executable) format.NET code we know and love.įor instance, a typical Xamarin.Android APK file contains binaries compiled from various languages: Xamarin.Android has to run through the same build pipeline as Android apps built in Android Studio–with the addition of supporting the. There is quite a bit of complexity to packaging an Android application.

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