The developers of the Dart language tell that there is a virtual machine that executes statements written in Dart language. What is the difference between an interpreter and a virtual machine that executes a language?
Until now the virtual machines that I knew, like Java Virtual Machine, Common Language Runtime, and Dalvik all execute bytecode that has been previously compiled from a programming language.
How does it work a virual machine that executes directly a programming language?
It probably works just as a normal Virtual Machine just instead of translating bytecode into machine code it translates the language into machine code. This might be different from an interpreter by having a JIT compiler which starts to compile the code into machine language and keeps this code to be run while an interpreter translates into machine code each time an instruction is executed.
And how do you think the bytecode got created? Most probably something read the statements written in a language and converted it to bytecode. For example Java and C# compilers both do this.
Dart VM just skips this step and reads the statements directly. It is actually quite common for interpreted languages to do that. For example JavaScript and PHP were both like this before it became necessary to improve performance, and add the bytecode-generation step into the runtime process.
The 1K (not a typo) Basic for the earliest home computers, and their beefier descendents, worked by interpreting directly from the source code. Bill Gates was no slouch!
