The Java® Virtual Machine Specification, Java SE 7 Edition, Third Edition

1.2. The Java Virtual Machine

The Java Virtual Machine is the cornerstone of the Java platform. It is the component of the technology responsible for its hardware- and operating system-independence, the small size of its compiled code, and its ability to protect users from malicious programs.

The Java Virtual Machine is an abstract computing machine. Like a real computing machine, it has an instruction set and manipulates various memory areas at run time. It is reasonably common to implement a programming language using a virtual machine; the best-known virtual machine may be the P-Code machine of UCSD Pascal.

The first prototype implementation of the Java Virtual Machine, done at Sun Microsystems, Inc., emulated the Java Virtual Machine instruction ...