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Capt'n Corrupt's Avatar
Posts: 3,524 | Thanked: 2,958 times | Joined on Oct 2007 @ Delta Quadrant
#165
Originally Posted by wmarone View Post
Off on semi-related tangent, is not the portability of Dalvik binaries largely irrelevant due to the extremely narrow range of architectures (officially only ARM) that Android is running on? Certainly you have variations between ARMv6 and ARMv7, but that's so trivial as to be easily automated with the click of a button.

I could always take the Free Software bent and note that VM-based software is irrelevant if you have the source code.
Indeed, this is true most of the time. In recent days, though, Android is deployed to x86 devices in the form of Google TV, and the rate of evolution of the mobile arena does not elude to a clear architecture leader. The VM leaves the arch out of the equation so acrh innovation can happen without sacrificing compatibility.

Yes, code is indeed very portable often rendering VMs unecessary, of course....