In this episode of Android Developers Backstage, Romain Guy, Tor Norbye, Leland Richardson, and Chuck Jeske discuss recent advancements and internal workings of Compose, focusing on performance improvements. They introduce "Pausable Composition," a feature that allows compositions to span frames during prefetch, particularly benefiting scrolling in lazy lists by breaking up large items across multiple frames. The discussion covers the similarities to coroutines, the role of the Compose compiler in enabling pausing, and the potential for broader applications beyond prefetching, such as navigation scenarios. They also delve into "strong skipping," a feature enabled by default in Kotlin 2.1, which improves performance by treating objects as stable unless modified, and address challenges in prefetch strategies, including issues with heterogeneous lists and scheduling. Additionally, they touch on runtime diagnostics, exception handling, and potential future tools for developers to better understand and optimize Compose performance, emphasizing the importance of initial composition and cautioning against over-optimization of specific aspects like stability.
