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Android Developers Backstage

Episode 213: Compose runtime and performance

Mar 4, 2025
Leland Richardson and Chuck Jasky, both key members of Google's Compose team, dive into performance optimization for the Compose toolkit. They discuss groundbreaking features like Pausable Composition, which automates updates and enhances rendering speed. The duo also tackles the challenges of managing mutable versus immutable objects and the intricacies of equality in Kotlin. Additionally, they touch on the balance between stability and performance, and highlight new diagnostic tools improving the developer experience in Android app development.
56:56

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • The introduction of Pausable Composition allows developers to manage composition tasks more effectively, reducing jank during rendering operations.
  • Optimizing prefetching strategies in Compose enables smoother scrolling experiences and enhances performance during fast user interactions with lists.

Deep dives

Pausable Composition and Performance Optimization

A new feature called Pausable Composition has been developed to enhance performance during composition tasks by allowing tasks that require multiple frames to be broken down and managed more effectively. This feature automatically manages the stopping points during composition, allowing developers to focus on writing composable functions without needing to implement complex threading or buffering logic. By pausing and resuming composition during idle times, it reduces the chances of jank, especially in scenarios like scrolling lists where large items may take longer to render. This approach is akin to how coroutines operate, but it is specifically optimized for the Compose framework.

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