The process transforms human-readable instructions, written in the Java programming language, into an intermediary representation. This representation, often referred to as bytecode, is a platform-independent set of instructions understood by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As an example, a developer might write code to perform a calculation; this code then undergoes the translation to become a series of bytecode instructions.
This transformation is essential for Java’s “write once, run anywhere” capability. By converting the source code into bytecode, the same compiled code can execute on any system with a compatible JVM, regardless of the underlying operating system or hardware. Historically, this approach addressed the challenges of software portability across diverse computing environments. It allows for efficiency because it needs to be compiled only once.
