Common Language Infrastructure - Overview

Overview

Among other things, the CLI specification describes the following four aspects:

The Common Type System (CTS)

A set of data types and operations that are shared by all CTS-compliant programming languages.

Metadata

Information about program structure is language-agnostic, so that it can be referenced between languages and tools, making it easy to work with code written in a language you are not using.

Common Language Specification (CLS)

A set of base rules to which any language targeting the CLI should conform in order to interoperate with other CLS-compliant languages. The CLS rules define a subset of the Common Type System.

Virtual Execution System (VES)

The VES loads and executes CLI-compatible programs, using the metadata to combine separately generated pieces of code at runtime.

All compatible languages compile to Common Intermediate Language (CIL), which is an intermediate language that is abstracted from the platform hardware. When the code is executed, the platform-specific VES will compile the CIL to the machine language according to the specific hardware and operating system.