OK, you're a happy Clojure user (I'm not familiar with Groovy and haven't heard of Solr). Clojure is very functional and I expect idiomatic memory usage patterns are different than those of Java and other imperative OO languages.

Oracle's patent lawsuit against the Dalvik VM has cast a cloud on deep innovations in JVMs, such as GC implementations tuned for Clojure.

Is there going to be a long term problem? Who knows, who can say? All we know is that Oracle's lawyers were eager to sue Google whereas "patent suits [were] never in Sun's genetic code" (http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits...); what follows will depend on how that goes and who knows what else.

At the very least I'm pretty sure this is having a chilling effect. If you have various areas in which you can do things, why do deep JVM innovation. E.g. for Clojure, perhaps Clojure-in-Clojure targeting another platform, most especially x86_64? (This is not idle speculation, BTW.)

I don't disagree with anything you said.

I'm just saying the sky isn't falling for the average developer that is using the JVM. We'll all be using XYZ technology, which hasn't been invented yet, in 3-5 years anyway.

Google is the one with the short term vested interest in distributing a VM that runs Java.

Google's Dalvik (VM) does not run Java.

The Android _SDK_ is Java based. The Android apps are written in Java, the language, compiled into Java bytecode (Java class files) and the class files are converted into single dex file, which is custom instruction set. Then the app is moved onto the device and run.

The Android runtime is neither Java, nor JVM. It is custom (proprietary) VM that happens to use library that is API compatible with Java's standard library (Apache Harmony compiled and converted to dex; again, no java bytecode in sight).