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.

[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.