Compiler optimizations and software engineering techniques for improving application launch time

Aditya Kumar
Compiler Engineer Google, Santa Clara, CA

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Launch time of applications has been a concern for a very long time. It has become more important with mobile apps as startup time often regresses with feature additions. For many mobile applications, launch time tests users' patience. While devices are becoming faster, developers find creative ways to regress startup time by adding features or unnecessary software engineering.

Optimizing for launch time is a little different than optimizing purely for code size or for performance. Some code size optimizations help startup and so do many redundancy elimination optimizations. In this presentation I'll discuss program instrumentation techniques to get insights into application launch time. I'll share measurement techniques to get insights into different parts of application startup. I'll talk about compiler optimizations that help application launch time. I'll also present other methodologies to improve startup time like order file generation, removing static initializers etc.