The Java Virtual Machine
While platform-independent bytecode provides complete portability between different hardware platforms, a physical CPU still can't execute it. The CPU only knows to execute its particular flavor of native code.
Note
Throughout this text, we will refer to code that is specific to a certain hardware architecture as native code. For example, x86 assembly language or x86 machine code is native code for the x86 platform. Machine code should be taken to mean code in binary platform-dependent format. Assembly language should be taken to mean machine code in human-readable form.
Thus, the JVM is required to turn the bytecodes into native code for the CPU on which the Java application executes. This can be done in one of the following ...
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