Android's VM

Or <jwz>I, for one, welcome our new virtual machine overlords</jwz>

A very interesting theory on why Google created a new VM for Android instead of using an existing VM:

Dalvik is a virtual machine, just like Java's or .NET's.. but it's Google's own and they're making it open source without having to ask permission to anyone (well, for now, in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits on this, especially since Sun and Microsoft signed a cross-IP licensing agreement on exactly such virtual machines technologies years ago... but don't forget IBM who has been writing emulation code for mainframes since the beginning of time).

But Android's programs are written in Java, using Java-oriented IDEs (it also comes with an Eclipse plugin)... it just doesn't compile the java code into java bytecode but (ops, Sun didn't see this one coming) into Dalvik bytecode.

So, Android uses the syntax of the Java platform (the Java "language", if you wish, which is enough to make java programmers feel at home and IDEs to support the editing smoothly) and the java SE class library but not the Java bytecode or the Java virtual machine to execute it on the phone (and, note, Android's implementation of the Java SE class library is, indeed, Apache Harmony's!)

With this VM, they managed to not depend on Sun terms for the future of the language and the VM or be bound by any definitions of the Java language. It is worth reading the entire article.

Once the source code for Android is released, it would be interesting to look into integrating Mono wiht it. It should already run on it, as its just Linux. What would be interesting is continuing to use C# to write code for it.

Some ideas that have been bounced around in the mono channels recently include:

• CIL to Dalvik recompiler: Translate CIL bytecodes into Dalvik ones, like (like Grasshopper does) and provide a class library add-on.
• DalvikVM: Implement a VM similar on top of Mono that can run Dalvik bytecodes side-by-side with other CIL code. This would be similar to the IKVM approach: a JavaVM for CIL.
• Dalvik Support in Mono: Paolo suggested to add support to the Mono VM to have a Dalvik loader and turn the Dalvik instructions into the internal Mono IR (the rest at that point would be shared).
• D/Invoke: Add support to the Mono VM to transparently call code into another VM. Very much along the lines of P/Invoke or COM's it-just-works support.

Looking forward to the release.