[cwyers]

What on Earth are you talking about? From Google's own developer reference[1]:

> Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

In order to compile for Android, you use JACK, the Java Android Compiler Kit.[2] I could go on. Google uses the name Java all the time in reference to the language used for Android.

Google didn't base a language off Java. Android uses Java-the-language, unmodified (and an outdated one at that). It uses some existing Java APIs as well, and keeps the same names, which is why the official Android API reference[3] has the word Java appearing more times in it than a history of Indonesia.

[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html [2] https://source.android.com/source/jack.html [3] http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/package-sum...

[coldtea]

That's because, as they explicitly write: "Android follows the package and class namespace conventions defined by the Java programming language". And obviously, the names in the packages are carried over, including sun.*, and the documentation is gonna follow that -- though the official name of the runtime is Dalvik (and ART), not Java or JVM or anything like that.

As I wrote, that was intentional, so that it's immediately familiar to Java programmers. That's just at the superficial API level though, which Oracle contested in court and I don't recall HNers being on their side...

Nobody was ever meant to use it to replace Java in their Java deployments and enterprise apps, or to run Java apps as is on that environment. And Google never promoted it as such -- as a Java replacement. Only as a Java-like environment specifically for Android development, and tied to the specific needs of its OS and devices.

What Android actually runs is a different language implementation through and through, with a different scope (target OS, environments, use etc) and a different VM, GC and tons of different APIs, with tons of not used APIs compared to the Java one's too (Swing for starters). And it's own bytecode of course.

So why should it follow Oracle's Java versions and progress, when it's NOT meant as a Java replacement? It has its own roadmap.

Heck, even the Java-like code behind the APIs, what's not 100% Googles, is not Oracle's or Sun's, but from the open source Apache Harmony project.

[cwyers]

I think you're conflating Java the language and the Java Virtual Machine. Android does not run the JVM, it runs Dalvik and now ART. Android is going to continue to do this. But it has and will continue to use Java the language, not some language based off Java, as well.

And in fact Oracle's lawsuit is about neither the language or the runtime, it's about the APIs. Yes, they were taken from Apache Harmony. Oracle insists that Android's use of them infringes because Google created a derived work, incompatible with the full Java API, from the Harmony implementation of the Java API. Google, in fact, is replacing the Harmony code with OpenJDK[1], Oracle's official open-source implementation of the Java API. (Which is one of about a billion reasons why your claim that Android uses a language based on Java instead of actually using Java is so baffling -- it's so based on Java that they can replace their code with Oracle's official Java implementation!)

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switche...

[coldtea]

>But it has and will continue to use Java the language, not some language based off Java, as well.

Java is not the syntax, though, it's the whole specificication -- down to the bytecode.

Google just borrowed the syntax (and API).

(As did other people and projects who did "clean room" clones of Java, while not calling their product/project Java).

>And in fact Oracle's lawsuit is about neither the language or the runtime, it's about the APIs.

Yeah, that's what I wrote above: "That's just at the superficial API level though, which Oracle contested in court".

[cwyers]

I mean, up until a year or two ago, Google just shipped Oracle's javac compiler with its Android build toolchain. This makes about as much sense as saying that if you use musl libc instead of glibc that you're using a different language.