The document discusses the Dalvik virtual machine (VM) used in Android. It begins by explaining what a VM is and the basic parts that make up a VM. It then discusses the differences between stack-based and register-based VMs, noting that Dalvik uses a register-based architecture. The document explains that Dalvik was chosen for Android because it executes faster than Java VM and uses less memory. It also describes how Java bytecodes are converted to Dalvik bytecodes and discusses optimizations like shared constant pools and just-in-time compilation that improve Dalvik's performance.