Support for Newer Dex Versions

[thekief]

There have been multiple issues, e.g. [1-4], asking whether recent versions of the .dex format will be supported. All these issues were answered rather vaguely and it is not clear what the state of current .dex format support is other than that currently 035 is the highest supported one.

In 2019 @justinjhendrick wrote that there is some work going on for 038:

... Right now, we're working hard to support dex 038 as soon as possible. ...

but there has been no further update on that. It would be really helpful to get a roadmap or any input on what blockers are currently keeping the the support for new dex versions from progressing and what maybe could be done to address them.

[1] #260
[2] #434
[3] #667
[4] #685

[NTillmann]

My last answer #685 still applies: There have not been any significant changes to the supported versions recently. Only version 035 is fully supported.

There is no roadmap to fully support additional versions at this point. We investigated, but didn't find that going beyond 035 would provide meaningful benefits, considering both runtime performance and code size.

(If you directly interact with the APIs that read dex files, you might be able to set the support_dex_version to 37/38 and read such dex files. However, the optimizations and analyses in Redex will not work properly.)