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Dalvik is designed around criteria that are nearly diametrically opposed to those for Hotspot. Hotspot goes for maximum performance. Dalvik's JIT compiler is designed for maximum impact on performance with minimum computation. In other words, Dalvik's JIT is designed for battery powered devices.

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Oh, sure, I absolutely realise that a very aggressive JIT wouldn't be ideal for Dalvik. However, given that the article is talking about how wonderful JIT is, it perhaps concentrates a little too much on all the wonderful JIT things that Dalvik (the only mobile JIT of serious interest to most developers) does not do.

Since the article was written by a Sun guy Dalvik is probably not the area of expertise there...

Depends on what you mean by 'Hotspot'. Both of Sun's embedded JVMs (CDC, CLDC) had 'Hotspot' implementations. Both of these implementations performed many of these types of optimizations (which I can say with certainty because I wrote many of them). I'm no Dalvik expert, but there really isn't any reason why it shouldn't be able to do similar optimizations. Remember that the CDC and CLDC Hotspot implementations were originally developed for hardware of the early 2000s.

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