Technical Overview of the CLR

First of all, I found funny that the author says repeatedly that he prefers CLI over JVM. I know he’s talking about his personal opinion, but It feels like he has something against JVM for some reason further than the implementation or the advantages of CLI.

   I think it’s a little bit hard, at least for me, to keep all the information about how the CLI works because of its complexity. I mean, When I read the components that the author mentions in the article, I didn’t understand some things and had to look for some further information in the web, but even with that I could not understand at all the principles of CLI. All the information I processed by reading this article will let me know a little bit more about what a compiler is able to do or cannot do while is being implemented into the CLI or the JVM, but I think I’ll need more practice to understand these concepts.

  I found that the CLI is much more polymorphic than JVM because of its construction. The instructions it manages lets the compilers generate que MSI code and define the type information for the result of those instructions. It makes it easier for the compiler but gets harder for the JIT. The CLI also works on the interaction between values and reference types by providing built-in support for boxing and unboxing variables so it’s easier for implementors to switch between them as needed. The author tries more than once to show that the CLI is much more powerful than the JVM because of its multi-language platform that let the programmers use multi-language libraries to develop applications. Also, he says that the .NET product groups are still working on adding more compatibility with more languages to make it more powerful.