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The first paragraph is just rampant self praise. Basically these engineers decided to be really clever, painted themselves into a corner, smashed a hole in the
by marhumph 14y ago
The first paragraph is just rampant self praise. Basically these engineers decided to be really clever, painted themselves into a corner, smashed a hole in the wall so as to escape from said corner, and then bragged about how great they are.
- mikeash 14y agoHitting an arbitrary (and undocumented?) platform limit on the number of methods your app is allowed to have is hardly "painting themselves into a corner".
- myko 14y agoI'm not sure if it is listed in the official documentation but it was talked about by the Android team on their blog: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/custom-class-loading-in-dalvik.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/custom-class-...
- mikeash 14y agoThis appears to discuss the per-dex method limit but makes no mention of the per-process limit.
- zeckalpha 14y agoWelcome to Facebook engineering.
- bhaak 14y agoAs a programmer if you feel clever, most of the time you're doing something wrong. There might be 1% of code that should or can be clever but I prefer my code to be robust. They clearly say that "this idea seemed completely insane" so it's not like they took this road lightly. They searched for a solution and became rather desperate. I wonder if they asked Google for help. Having said that I'm not sure I would be frank about such a crazy hack for a slow behemoth app that is only considered "fast" because the previous version was insultingly slow.