Meet Jack and Jill: Android’s Experimental Toolchain

Earlier this week, Google finally pushed the stable version of Android Studio, replacing Eclipse with ADT plugin. It appears that the Mountain View company is on a roll, as they recently announced a very new and experimental toolchain named Jack and Jill.

Jack (Java Android Compiler Kit) and Jill (Jack Intermediate Library Linker) are the two tools at the core of the new toolchain. Google is encouraging developers to play with it a bit to see whether or not there are some noticeable improvements. Here’s a short explanation by Google regarding the new toolchain:

The Android Gradle plugin and Jack collect any .jack library files, along with your source code, and compiles them into a set of dex files. During the process, Jack also handles any requested code minification. The output is then assembled into an APK file as normal.

Adding Jack to the project is very easy. If you are using the 21.1.1+ Build Tools for Android Studio, you can simply add the “useJack = true” to your build.gradle file. It looks like the Android Developer team will make Jack and Jill a default toolchain for applications in the future. Right now, they are working to make the transition as smooth as possible.

More details with some code examples can be found on the Android Developers blog. Head over there to learn more.

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source: xdadevelopers