Google and Oracle are duking it out in court over the question of whether Google had the rights to use Java as a basis for the Android operating system. Meanwhile the developers at Xamarin have shown that Android doesn’t need to run on Java at all.

They’ve taken the source code for Android and modified it so that instead of running on a Dalvik Java virtual machine, it uses a virtual machine based on Mono, the open source implementation of C#.

The results? Xamarin ran a series of benchmarks and found that Android actually runs faster on C# than it does on Java.

XobotOS (Android on C#)

Xamarin has released the source code for their new version of Android. They call it XobotOS, and it’s available on github.

I wouldn’t hold my breathe waiting for Google to drop Java or for handset or tablet makers to adopt XobotOS. The developers created the operating system mostly to see if they could. While they expect to use some of the things they learned in future software projects, they don’t plan to continue developing XobotOS.

Since the source code is available I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see hackers and hobbyists try to get it up and running on existing Android hardware.

But I suspect that some apps written for Android would fail to run on XobotOS unless they were rewritten to run on C#.

via Slashdot

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6 replies on “Android without Java: Xamarin ports Google’s OS to run on C#”

  1. That is nice because
    1-java suck
    2-c# much faster
    think this will make number one programing language

  2. i am having trouble installing the android emulator and stuff like that
    i went to run and cmd…. and then i went to and typed all the things u said and it gave me a permission denied …

  3. This is ridiculous and the poster should learn at least basic facts about Android before posting such nonsense without proper editorial comments.

    Android applications DON’T run on a Java VM. Android applications are programmed in the Java source language but the libraries are not Java compatible (the libraries are created by Google).

    Android apps run in a virtual machine called Dalvik which is hugely inferior to modern Java VMs performance-wise. Dalvik is like a 10 year-old Java VM (like Java 1.1 and now we use Java 7). Google cannot use a proper VM because Oracle has most of the advanced aspects patented and doesn’t want to pay royalties to Oracle.

    Oracle engineers have already shown that Android programs could run 2-3 times faster in a proper Java VM instead of Dalvik. And that is after the huge improvements in Android 2.2 (where JIT compiling first appeared in Android)

    Miguel de Icaza should prove that Java SE programs run faster on C# than on a Java VM and that would be something.

    He can’t because Mono is nowhere near the performance of Java SE, so he bullies its handicapped distant relative, Dalvik.

  4. This is both insanely great and greatly insane! I tip my cap to Xamarin.

    1. agreed.. I wish de Caza and his team of trolling programmers would just join Microsoft and get it over with.

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