Was Dalvik ported to other platforms (e.g. Linux, Windows, etc.)?

Question

Just a question of interest. Anyway it is a VM, thus cross-platform independency is assumed. And debugging could be easier.

Answer 1

Have a look at YouWave. It is faster than AVD but we can't debug from it.

There are also a number of x86 port projects. Google for android x86

Answer 2

I suppose it could be ported, but you still wouldn't be able to run your apps on a PC using it. Dalvik is just a compiler. It does not handle any of the libraries. A lot of the libraries the API accesses are written in C and are written and optimized for ARM. These could be ported over to x86, but that also poses a problem. You would be running and debugging these apps in x86 on a machine far more powerful than any phone, using libraries that are unoptimized for x86. Your app could behave far differently on your computer than it would on an actual device.

Besides, the emulator is a good, easy solution to an extremely complex problem. Just use that.

Answer 3

I would say that Android_x86 running under VirtualBox is a perfect sandbox for dalvik-only (not including native code) applications. It is much faster than Android SDK emulator.