The Dalvik virtual machine is a register-based virtual machine, designed and written by Dan Bornstein with contributions from other Google engineers as part of the Android mobile phone platform.[1]
It is optimized for low memory requirements, and is designed to allow multiple VM instances to run at once, relying on the underlying operating system for process isolation, memory management and threading support.
The Dalvik virtual machine was named by Bornstein after the fishing village of Dalvík in Eyjafjörður, Iceland, where some of his ancestors lived.[2][3]
Architecture
Being optimized for low memory requirements, Dalvik has some specific characteristics that differentiate it from other standard VMs[4]:
Dalvik uses Apache Harmony (which is under the Apache License) instead of OpenJDK (which is under the GPL + linking exception) to allow cell phone makers to modify the core VM without having to distribute their code.
Relationship to Java
Dalvik is often referred to as a Java Virtual Machine, but this is not strictly accurate, as the bytecode on which it operates is not Java bytecode. Instead, a tool named dx, included in the Android SDK, transforms the Java Class files of Java classes compiled by a regular Java compiler into another class file format (the .dex format).[5]
References
External links
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