Interesting enough, Google chose to build upon the Eclipse java compiler instead of Sun/Oracle's javac. I'm guessing this is due to javac being GPL and the Android SDK being Apache License 2.0.<p>This is strangely reminiscent of Apple's strong backing of LLVM.<p>More competition and corporate funding in the compiler scene is always a good thing.
Really bad news for strong Java shops and developers. This move away from Java byte code probably means very little hope for Java 8 compatibility in Android any time soon. For myself, I wrote Java server code for a decade before writing Android apps and the companies I work at often have an order of magnitude more Java server programmers than Android programmers, if they have any Android devs. So more compatibility and feature parity with Java proper would have been great.