No. But if I write a web site in php, I don't have to care what architecture the server has - the web service can run on a Wintel machine or a Linux machine or a Solaris machine.

For people writing mobile phone applications, the phone manufacturer arranges a java environment.

Think about Android phones - there are huge variation in actual architectures but most of these architecture changes isn't important to the Java developer. With some exceptions, the java application needs to adapt to small, medium or large displays. But no need to worry what processor the phone has.

The big thing here is that the responsibility for the platform support have to a large part been shifted from application developer to the platform developer. So the application can be moved to new platforms that didn't even exist when the application was written.


The problem with developing your own interpreted language is that you must also create the interpreter and port that interpreter to all relevant hardware.

When using an existing, larger, interpreted language, someone else will most probably take care of the porting of the interpreter.

And some interpreted languages have support for just-in-time compilation (JIT), where the interpreted program may - on some platforms - be slowly auto-converted to machine instructions without that the application developer needs to lift a finger. So in some situations, interpreted languages may reach execution speeds quite close to compiled languages. Especially since many languages have a huge set of library functions that can be compiled already from start.