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Java platform
Main articles: Java (software platform) and Java virtual machine
Java Control Panel, version 7
One design goal of Java is portability, which means that programs written for the Java platform must run similarly on any combination of hardware and operating system with adequate runtime support. This is achieved by compiling the Java language code to an intermediate representation called Java bytecode, instead of directly to architecture-specific machine code. Java bytecode instructions are analogous to machine code, but they are intended to be executed by a virtual machine (VM) written specifically for the host hardware. End users commonly use a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on their own machine for standalone Java applications, or in a web browser for Java applets.
Standard libraries provide a generic way to access host-specific features such as graphics, threading, and networking.
The use of universal bytecode makes porting simple. However, the overhead of interpreting bytecode into machine instructions makes interpreted programs almost always run more slowly than native executables. Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers that compile bytecodes to machine code during runtime were introduced from an early stage. Java itself is platform-independent, and is adapted to the particular platform it is to run on by a Java virtual machine for it, which translates the Java bytecode into the platform's machine language.[33]
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