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From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: the history of Java in Android (was Re: =?utf-8?Q?What?= =?utf-8?Q?=E2=80=99s?= Your Least Favourite Programming Language?)
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:24:51 -0300
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:27:04 -0300, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:
>> Your statement, “So [the Android team] adapted [OpenJDK] instead [when
>> they could have chosen J2ME],” is not true of *either* the language
>> implementation (Dalvik) *or* the library implementation (initially they
>> adapted Harmony, and many years later they adapted OpenJDK).
>
> “Dalvik” was the original bytecode interpreter that Google came up
> with for Android. That was not a “language implementation” for any
> particular “language”.
>
> By “language implementation” I was talking about SunJDK versus
> OpenJDK.

We've agreed that they weren’t using the Sun JDK’s class library;
instead they used Apache Harmony.  We've agreed that they weren’t using
the Sun JDK’s bytecode interpreter; instead they used Dalvik.  I'm
pretty sure they weren’t using the Sun JDK’s compiler from Java source
to Java bytecode, because Dalvik couldn’t interpret the standard
stack-oriented JVM bytecode.  Was there some other part of the Sun JDK
that they *were* using?  If so, what part?  What does the JDK contain,
other than the class library, the virtual machine, and the compiler to
that virtual machine?

Kragen