Pro Android Apps Performance Optimization

Chapter  2

Getting Started With the NDK

The Android Native Development Kit (NDK) is a companion to the SDK and is what you use when you want part or all of your Android application to use native code. While bytecode needs to be interpreted by a virtual machine, native code can be directly executed by the device's processor without any intermediate step, making execution faster, and sometimes much faster. The Dalvik Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler is compiling the bytecode into native code, making your applications faster by having to interpret the code less often (and ideally, only once) since it will use the native code it generated whenever it is available. When you use the NDK, the compilation into native code occurs on your development environment ...