Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile

ozmanjusri writes "New smartphones may be lightweight, compact objects, but their OSs are anything but. Ice Cream Sandwich will need workstations with no less than 16 GB RAM to build the source code, twice the amount Gingerbread needed. It will take 5 hours to compile on a dual quad-core 2+GHz workstation, and need 80GB disk space for all AOSP configs. Android developers are also being warned to be cautious of undocumented APIs: 'In almost every case, there's only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We're not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we're not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation. We're not claiming that they're "Private" or "Secret" — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We're also not claiming they're forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run.'"

If memory were still expensive...

[JackAxe]

This article would be shocking, but considering that 16 GB of memory -- especially the dual-channel DDR3 used for the i5 and consumer i7's -- is so cheap, less than $100, this article doesn't have any shock value. It's just informative. It's letting us know the 'recommended' memory and giving more nerds an excuse to add more RAM. That is the NERDS that don't already have 24 gigs for their virtual machines. :P