Originally posted by Stan James:
Folks have built chips where the native instruction set happens to exactly match byte code from some comiler. One of the early Pascal compilers generated byte code that was interpreted at runtime and I remember reading about a project to make a chip to run the bytecode directly. I think it was an academic exercise, not a commercial one. Man, I can almost say the name of that fool compiler, something based on UCSD I think. I was forced to use it for a couple months before somebody changed the project to Clipper.
True, but the JVM does things which it is not instructed to do by byte code. These things are also part of
Java proper. Java is an environment or system, not just a language. Even J2ME in its resource limited environment runs on a JVM that they call "KVM."
The JVM spec does not require the JVM to be implemented in software. You can do it in hardware.
I believe Microsoft was sued for its JVM not its compiler.