• DOI:10.1109/MSPEC.2011.5910448
• Corpus ID: 40545952

The soul of the virtual machine

@article{McMillan2011TheSO,
  title={The soul of the virtual machine},
  author={William W. McMillan},
  journal={IEEE Spectrum},
  year={2011},
  volume={48},
  pages={44-59}
}

• W. W. McMillan
• Published 23 June 2011
• Computer Science
• IEEE Spectrum

Java's ability to run on many different kinds of computers grew out of software devised decades before - The enduring appeal of Java isn't hard to understand: With Java, you write code once and it can run on almost any modern computer or operating system-PC or Mac, Windows, Linux, OS X, whatever. It works that way because the Java compiler turns the source code into a kind of ersatz machine code that each of these different systems can execute when equipped with the proper run-time software. So different computers running different operating systems can all become, in programmers' parlance, Java virtual machines.