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<h3>Rationale</h3>

<p>Android is an important target for JVM languages. Clojure should run well there</p>

<ul>
	<li>Figure out what works and what doesn't
	<ul>
		<li>find it and write it up</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Fast startup</li>
	<li>Small footprint
	<ul>
		<li>Selectively strip metadata?</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
</ul>

<h3>Issues</h3>

<ul>
	<li>Needs a motivated owner</li>
	<li>Be careful not to compromise Clojure for base and other platforms in making Android work well</li>
	<li>Will we need some sort of conditional compilation?</li>
</ul>

<h3><span style="color: rgb(0,0,0);"><strong>Findings</strong></span></h3>

<ul>
	<li>Works out of the box with 1.2.0+
	<ul>
		<li>But only with API level 8 (FroYo/2.2) and above</li>
		<li>API level 7 (Eclair/2.1) works if a work-around can be added for <a href="http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5697">this bug</a></li>
		<li>API level 6 and lower fail during verification due to the bean function.  Given that market share of these platforms is less than 10% and falling, probably a low priority to fix it.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Startup time is a little sluggish, but not too bad</li>
	<li>The bean function causes some unnecessary GC and load time</li>
	<li><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">zip, xml, and set loading in RT.java add 1-2 seconds on to the load time</span> (fixed)</li>
	<li><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Average load time for a hello world app on stock clojure is 8-9 seconds using my macbook pro and the android emulator running Froyo</span></li>
	<li>Average load time for a hello world app drops to around 5 seconds with the bean function removed and zip, set, and xml removed from the load in RT.java</li>
	<li>Clojure adds =~ 4MB of overhead on application size (without any metadata stripped)
	<ul>
		<li>Standard Hello Android on Java: 20.01KB</li>
		<li>Standard Hello Android on Clojure: 4.21MB</li>
		<li>Can be reduced using ProGuard to strip out unused namespaces.</li>
		<li>However, namespaces are cannot be broken up.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Dynamic compilation
	<ul>
		<li>It is possible to add, but it is slow</li>
		<li>Some forms fail to compile due to excessive stack use, e.g.
<table class="wysiwyg-macro" data-macro-name="code" style="background-image: url(/plugins/servlet/confluence/placeholder/macro-heading?definition=e2NvZGV9&amp;locale=en_GB&amp;version=2); background-repeat: no-repeat;" data-macro-body-type="PLAIN_TEXT"><tr><td class="wysiwyg-macro-body"><pre>
(for [x (range 5) y (range 5)] [x y])
</pre></td></tr></table></li>
	</ul>
	</li>
</ul>