Dalvik was an open source process virtual machine used in Android up to version 4.4 (KitKat). It got its name after the Dalvík village in Iceland. Dalvik VM implements register-based architecture, which differs from stack-based architecture VMs such as Java VMs. The difference here is that stack-based machines use instructions to load and manipulate data on the stack and generally require more instructions than register machines in order to implement the same high-level code. In contrast, analogous register machine instructions often must define the register values used (which is not the case for stack-based machines, as the order of values on the stack is always known and the operands can be addressed implicitly by the stack pointer), so they tend to be bigger.
Usually, Dalvik programs are written in the Java or Kotlin languages before being converted to Dalvik instructions. For this purpose, a tool called dx is used, which converts Java class files into the DEX...
