Technical Overview of the Common Language Runtime

The functionality of the recently announced Microsoft .NET system is founded on the capabilities of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). Unlike some other recent systems based on virtual machines, the CLI was designed from the start to support a wide range of programming languages. It is also expected that ECMA standardization will make the CLI available on a wide range of computing platforms. This combination of multi-language capability and multiplatform implementation make the CLI an important target for future language compilers. In this paper, the technical details of the CLI are briefly described. To motivate some of the discussion a comparison is made with the Java virtual machine (JVM). The JVM was designed under rather different constraints, making it a much more difficult target for languages other than Java . We also briefly discuss the issues involved in mapping various language constructs to the primitives of the CLI.

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