Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile

ozmanjusri writes "New smartphones may be lightweight, compact objects, but their OSs are anything but. Ice Cream Sandwich will need workstations with no less than 16 GB RAM to build the source code, twice the amount Gingerbread needed. It will take 5 hours to compile on a dual quad-core 2+GHz workstation, and need 80GB disk space for all AOSP configs. Android developers are also being warned to be cautious of undocumented APIs: 'In almost every case, there's only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We're not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we're not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation. We're not claiming that they're "Private" or "Secret" — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We're also not claiming they're forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run.'"

Comments

Re:Of Course.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have to wonder if the 16GB "requirement" is more of a recommendation and/or a bunch of default settings that deliberately avoid the disk as much as possible, and keep as many cores as you can throw at the job busy by compiling every little bit and piece in parallel...

On the one hand, with 16GB of RAM in the desktop/light workstation 4x4GB only running around $100(with the more workstation-friendly 2x8GB with ECC only twice that), it seems rather pointless to burn any developer time on trying to optimize the RAM needs of building the entire OS. RAM is cheap.

On the other hand, I have to wonder what they could possibly be doing to the process of compiling what is basically a weird-but-not-unrecognizable linux distro to make it that RAM hungry.

Rookie question on debugging monster code bases

[Twinbee]

Quick question for those with giant codebases such as this. How the heck do you test, and debug the software with those kind of lag times? Do you split everything up into smaller pieces or something? If so, then surely there are cases where you need to test something that requires EVERYTHING to be compiled. I can imagine such shot in the dark scenarios to be the stuff of pure nightmares.

Re:Of Course.

[mjwx]

I have to wonder if the 16GB "requirement" is more of a recommendation and/or a bunch of default settings that deliberately avoid the disk as much as possible

I have to wonder if the 16 GB requirement is real.

Reading the blog linked to in the summary, there is no source mentioned. The author completely fails to mention how they came across this information. Even ignoring their bad English (obviously not their first language).

I think I'll wait for a more trustworthy source to confirm or deny this.