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Please forgive my ignorance, but wasn't Google sued by Oracle over issues regarding Google's implementation of the Java VM? It just sounds natural that other companies would be less motivated to maintain their implementations...

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No, Google is being sued because it doesn't implement the JVM. Instead Google created a completely independent VM for Android called Dalvik, and, crucially, a JVM to Dalvik bytecode compiler. Thus Google can leverage all the standard Java programming tools, but at the final stage of deployment they convert it to Dalvik which they claim is "not Java".

Very clever and very sneaky, which is why Oracle/Sun is annoyed.

Isn't that similar to GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) which can compile Java bytecode down to native machine code?

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