A Java compiler is a compiler for the programming language Java. The most common form of output from a Java compiler is s containing platform-neutral Java bytecode, but there are also compilers that output optimized native machine code for a particular hardware/operating system combination, most notably the now discontinued GNU Compiler for Java. Most Java-to-bytecode compilers do virtually no optimization, leaving this until run time to be done by the Java virtual machine (JVM). The JVM loads the class files and either interprets the bytecode or just-in-time compiles it to machine code and then possibly optimizes it using dynamic compilation. A standard on how to interact with Java compilers programmatically was specified in JSR 199.
Willy Zwaenepoel, Christopher Ming-Yee Iu