A software engineering team is developing a cross-platform mobile application. To ensure portability across various operating systems and CPU architectures, they decide to compile their source code into an intermediate representation (bytecode) to be executed by a virtual machine on target devices.
Which of the following statements correctly describes a characteristic or advantage of using bytecode and a virtual machine compared to pure compilation or pure interpretation?
The intermediate bytecode must be translated back into the original high-level source code on the target machine before any execution can begin.
Compiling to bytecode achieves execution speeds identical to native machine code because all translation is completed during the initial compilation phase.
The bytecode file is platform-independent, allowing the same compiled code to run on different processor architectures as long as a compatible virtual machine is present.
Bytecode is executed directly by the processor's physical control unit, meaning a virtual machine or interpreter is only required during development.