ART seems to be the future runtime on Android. Since it has an LLVM backend it would be interesting to investigate LLVM IR bitcode as the "code" format used in

ART seems to be the future runtime on Android. Since it has an LLVM backend it would be interesting to investigate LLVM IR bitcode as the "code" format used in the apk. This would make Android development technically possible feasible a number of languages. Microsoft has already done this with the CLR. What I am not clear on is how this would integrate with external libraries. Would you need LLVM IR based "shared libraries/dll's" for this to work? Google could provide LLVM IR bitcode (.o) files for the Android platform, and the llvm compiler/linker could reference those (this would be equivalent to the DLL's used in the CLR). Open source apps could do the same, but I am not sure how third party vendors feel about providing IR bitcode for their products. The optimized LLVM IR (bitcode) would then become part of the apk. Since ART does install time compilation, it could take the optimized LLVM IR in the apk and generate native code for that specific device.