Yep, hence me specifying the old one. ART cleans up a lot of things: no more 8-16KB main thread stacks, better code gen via AoT, fully precise collection, moving GC. It has some really ingenious features as well, like switching to a compacting GC with better throughput and space efficiency when an app goes in the background and latency is irrelevant. The switch to ART as default was actually in 5.0 (Lollipop).
It's almost enough to make me stop cursing Android developers and their children's children. Unfortunately version updates for non-Google devices are rare and everybody is still stuck supporting the majority of devices that are pre-Lollipop. Also it didn't make the APIs any better >:(
It's almost enough to make me stop cursing Android developers and their children's children. Unfortunately version updates for non-Google devices are rare and everybody is still stuck supporting the majority of devices that are pre-Lollipop. Also it didn't make the APIs any better >:(