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Comparing the Java Compiler to other Programming Language Compilers

The Java compiler is the program distributed with J2SE called javac, which translates Java source code (in .java files) into Runnable bytecode (.class files). The compiler generates an architecture-neutral object file format, the compiled code is executable on many processors, given the presence of the Java run time system. The Java compiler does this by generating bytecode instructions which have nothing to do with a particular computer architecture. Rather, they are designed to be both easy to interpret on any machine and easily translated into native machine code on the fly.

This is not a new idea. More than twenty years ago, both Niklaus Wirth's original implementation of Pascal and the UCSD Pascal system used the same technique. With the use of bytecodes, performance takes a major hit (but just-in-time compilation mitigates this in many cases). The designers of Java did an excellent job developing a bytecode instruction set that works well on today's most common computer architectures. And the codes have been designed to translate easily into actual machine instructions.
Unlike C and C++, there are no "implementation-dependent" aspects of the specification. The sizes of the primitive data types are specified, as is the behavior of arithmetic on them. For example, an int in Java is always a 32-bit integer. In C/C++, int can mean a 16-bit integer, a 32-bit integer, or any other size that the compiler vendor likes. The only restriction is that the int type must have at least as many bytes as a short int and cannot have more bytes than a long int. Having a fixed size for number types eliminates a major porting headache. Binary data is stored and transmitted in a fixed format, eliminating the "big endian/little endian" confusion. Strings are saved in a standard Unicode format.

Libraries

The libraries that are a part of the system define portable interfaces. For example, there is an abstract Window class and implementations of it for UNIX, Windows, and the Macintosh.

Java Virtual Machine
C++ versus Java Compilation
1) C++ versus Java Compilation

This shows how a C compiler on one computer would produce machine code specific to that architecture.
2) This shows how a C compiler on one computer would produce machine code specific to that architecture.

The output of the Java Compiler is referred to as Java bytecode.
3) The output of the Java Compiler is referred to as Java bytecode.