The ART of patience
Regarding ART possibly becoming the default runtime engine: I think that's good news because it means that we will get a stable version of ART then. I'm reluctant to work further on ART support at the moment for mainly three reasons:
1. Time. I used to spend every evening and every weekend for Xposed, either to give support here (often answering the same questions again and again), writing code or researching about bugs or new ideas. As you may have noticed, there are now days or even weeks where I don't even log on to XDA, and I'm actually glad about this.
2. Experimental software is bound to contain bugs, even severe ones. There is a reason why Google didn't make this choice available for the typical user (and keep in mind, we are not typical users). I neither want people to blame Xposed if their phone starts acting up nor do I want to hunt bugs which are caused by a runtime engine that is explicitely labelled as not finished yet.
3. As long as ART is experimental, it's much easier to make big changes to the code. Once a final version is out and used by the masses, quality engineers we be much more careful not to break things. That means that Xposed for ART on 4.5 (or whatever it will be called) might need to be completely different than for ART on 4.4. More variants means more time for maintenance. And I don't feel like pushing something out now just to drop support again in a later version. There is not enough benefit of using ART at the moment to justify that.
You know, I had already worked on ART support and spent several dozens of hours reading the code, looking for ways to hijack it, implementing my ideas, doing trial and error and starting again from the beginning. I finally had my Nexus 5 boot with Xposed in early December and quickly tested the App Settings module. I'm happy about that, but I also know that this was just a very experimental version, less ready than ART itself. It is totally hacked together and only tested with the stock ROM. ART is quite complex and has several different modes. It's not worth giving the current development to someone else before I have tested these things on my phone, where I can debug much better than instructing someone else to do it. It also requires rewriting app_process to be a light executable again, which loads either the Dalvik or ART Xposed library, depending on your settings. That would require changes in the installer as well, etc. etc.
So you see, there is still lots of work to do. At the moment, I'm not actively working on it, but trying to get some other things fixed (e.g. LG ROMs) or improved (installation via recovery, better installation feedback in case root access failed, static Busybox package). And as I said, I do have other things in my life as well. It's not about money, that's what I have my full-time job for. I work on Xposed for fun (and maybe a bit for the reputation
), so the best way to ensure that I keep on working on it is not taking away the fun part of it. Don't pressure me like it was my duty to implement something ASAP (!!!), be patient even if it takes a bit longer until I answer and join the volunteers who help answering basic questions here so I don't have to. Thanks!