General Information
During compilation of CLI programming languages, the source code is translated into CIL code rather than platform or processor-specific object code. CIL is a CPU- and platform-independent instruction set that can be executed in any environment supporting the Common Language Infrastructure, such as the .NET runtime on Windows, or the cross-platform Mono runtime. In theory, this eliminates the need to distribute different executable files for different platforms and CPU types. CIL code is verified for safety during runtime, providing better security and reliability than natively compiled executable files.
The execution process looks like this:
- Source code is converted to Common Intermediate Language, CIL's equivalent to Assembly language for a CPU.
- CIL is then assembled into a form of so-called bytecode and a CLI assembly is created.
- Upon execution of a CLI assembly, its code is passed through the runtime's JIT compiler to generate native code. Ahead-of-time compilation may also be used, which eliminates this step, but at the cost of executable file portability.
- The native code is executed by the computer's processor.
Read more about this topic: Common Intermediate Language
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