The Java language is designed to be compiled to a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is a software implementation of a computer that doesn't exist (easy there exi

The Java language is designed to be compiled to a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is a software implementation of a computer that doesn't exist (easy there existential freaks, I'm trying to keep this brief). The VM abstracts away the hardware differences between platforms, in theory allowing the Java language greater freedoms. Simple things like endian-ness are no longer a language issue as the VM says all machines are big endian. Compare this to C where the code is compiled to a native format that is very much tied to the hardware/OS platform.