What is the difference between assembly code and bytecode?

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While in the search for the various differences in the meanings of source code, bytecode, assembly code, machine code, compilers, linkers, interpreters, assemblers and all the rest, I only got confused on the difference between bytcode and assembly code.

Particularly the introduction this wikipedia article to describe CIL confused me since it seems to use both terms (assembly code and bytecode) interchangeably making me think they might mean exactly the same.

7 Answers

Bytecode is mainly for platform independence and needs a virtual environment to run.

Assembly code is human readable machine code (at a bit upper level) that directly run by the CPU.

Bytecode is not machine/hardware specific (directly handling hardware) but assembly code is machine/hardware specific.

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