Androids

25 Lean Code

Once you’ve written it all, you can’t go back and re-optimize.

—Bob Lee

One of the aspects that defined Android from the very early days was that it was incredibly optimized so that it would work on the very limited mobile devices of that time. The performance mindset of the team affected everything from the APIs (many of which were written in a specific way so as to avoid allocating memory) to the coding recommendations given to external developers. It was all about writing optimal code because every cycle, every kilobyte, takes away resources or spends battery life that is needed elsewhere.

At least part of this performance-first focus can be attributed to the background of the early team members. The engineers that had previously ...