[fpc-devel] New FPC target: JVM

[Jonas Maebe]

On 21 Aug 2011, at 11:52, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Lets see if I understand this correctly. Dalvik was designed to be
> suitable for systems that are constrained in terms of memory and
> processor speed. (Quoted from Wikipedia) Yet today's smart phones and
> tablets are more powerful than the desktops of just a few years ago,
> or even the computers that first sent man to the moon.

Mobile platforms are all about power consumption in order to make batteries last as long as possible. Generally: faster = less power usage.

> No, Java is also known as a platform (like Java Virtual Machine).

There are three separate things:
* Java the programming language
* the JVM platform/specification
* the JDK

There are indeed commonly called together "the Java platform", but they are not indivisible. That's why it's possible to e.g. compile Pascal code into JVM byte code that makes use of the JDK.

> Google (like Microsoft before it) is now tainting the Java platform by
> making it incompatible with existing Java.

Google is doing several things:
* they kept the Java programming language
* they replaced the JVM with Dalvik, to make it faster/more power efficient (by doing a bunch of analyses and transformations that are normally done at run time at compile time). This by itself does not introduce incompatibilities, since Java class files can be translated into Dalvik class files
* they replaced the JDK with their own class library, the Android SDK

Do you think it would have been better if they had said "you program in the Android language, which is identical to the Java language"?


Jonas