Share via

Welcome to the CLR Code Generation Team's blog

  • Article

This is the first blog post from the code generation feature team working on the Common Language Runtime (CLR). We're the group of individuals that make it possible to generate native code for all binaries that run on top of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Since all managed applications today are distributed in a format known as MSIL (for Microsoft Intermediate Language), the CLR is responsible for compiling MSIL to directly-executable machine code. That's where we come in -- currently we support compiling against 3 different machine architectures -- x86, x64, & IA64, and in 2 different compilation modes -- dynamic compilation using the Just-in-time compiler (JIT), and ahead-of-time/pre-compilation using NGen (for Native Generation). Two examples of design challenges in our space include balancing the quality of the generated code with the time taken to generate it, and balancing the desire to update NGen images soon after MSIL binaries are patched with the desire to keep patch install time at a minimum.

 

Expect posts about our JIT & NGen back-ends over the coming months on this blog. Also, please feel free to let us know what codegen-related topics you're interested in reading about.

Comments