stack based vs register based virtual machine architecture and the dalvik vm

[Kostja Stern has been kind enough to translate this article in russian, which can be found here] A virtual machine (VM) is a high level abstraction on top of the native operating system, that emulates a physical machine. Here, we are talking about process virtual machines and not system virtual machines. A virtual machine enables the same platform to run on multiple operating systems and hardware architectures. The Interpreters for Java and Python can be taken as examples, where the code is compiled into their VM specific bytecode. The same can be seen in the Microsoft .Net architecture, where code is compiled into intermediate language for the CLR (Common Language Runtime).
orginal post on markfaction