Common Intermediate Language (CIL), formerly called Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) or Intermediate Language (IL), is the intermediate language binary instruction set defined within the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification. CIL instructions are executed by a CIL-compatible runtime environment such as the Common Language Runtime. Languages which target the CLI compile to CIL. CIL is object-oriented, stack-based bytecode. Runtimes typically just-in-time compile CIL instructions into native code.
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
- Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;
- Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that;
- Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter's virtual machine.
Bytecode is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects.
In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation is compilation during execution of a program rather than before execution. This may consist of source code translation but is more commonly bytecode translation to machine code, which is then executed directly. A system implementing a JIT compiler typically continuously analyses the code being executed and identifies parts of the code where the speedup gained from compilation or recompilation would outweigh the overhead of compiling that code.
The Visual Component Library (VCL) is a visual component-based object-oriented framework for developing the user interface of Microsoft Windows applications. It is written in Object Pascal.
LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine, though the project has expanded and the name is no longer officially an initialism.
An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be accurate – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and independent of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an intermediate language.
Managed Extensions for C++ or Managed C++ is a deprecated set of language extensions for C++, including grammatical and syntactic extensions, keywords and attributes, to bring the C++ syntax and language to the .NET Framework. These extensions were created by Microsoft to allow C++ code to be targeted to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in the form of managed code, as well as continue to interoperate with native code.
Singularity is an experimental operating system developed by Microsoft Research between July 9, 2003, and February 7, 2015. It was designed as a high dependability OS in which the kernel, device drivers, and application software were all written in managed code. Internal security uses type safety instead of hardware memory protection.
IP Pascal is an implementation of the Pascal programming language using the IP portability platform, a multiple machine, operating system and language implementation system. It implements the language "Pascaline", and has passed the Pascal Validation Suite.
Application virtualization software refers to both application virtual machines and software responsible for implementing them. Application virtual machines are typically used to allow application bytecode to run portably on many different computer architectures and operating systems. The application is usually run on the computer using an interpreter or just-in-time compilation (JIT). There are often several implementations of a given virtual machine, each covering a different set of functions.
In computer science, ahead-of-time compilation is the act of compiling an (often) higher-level programming language into an (often) lower-level language before execution of a program, usually at build-time, to reduce the amount of work needed to be performed at run time.
C# Open Source Managed Operating System (Cosmos) is a toolkit for building GUI and command-line based operating systems, written mostly in the programming language C# and small amounts of a high-level assembly language named X#. Cosmos is a backronym, in that the acronym was chosen before the meaning. It is open-source software released under a BSD license.
SharpOS is a discontinued computer operating system based on the .NET Framework and related programming language C#. It was developed by a group of volunteers and presided over by a team of six project administrators: Mircea-Cristian Racasan, Bruce Markham, Johann MacDonagh, Sander van Rossen, Jae Hyun, and William Lahti. It is no longer in active development, and resources have been moved to the MOSA project. As of 2017, SharpOS is one of three C#-based operating systems released under a free and open-source software license. SharpOS has only one public version available. and a basic command-line interface.
The Native Image Generator, or simply NGen, is the ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) service of the .NET Framework. It allows a CLI assembly to be pre-compiled instead of letting the Common Language Runtime (CLR) do a just-in-time compilation (JIT) at runtime. In some cases the execution will be significantly faster than with JIT.
Dart is a programming language designed by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund and developed by Google. It can be used to develop web and mobile apps as well as server and desktop applications.
Mono is a free and open-source software framework that aims to run software made for the .NET Framework on Linux and other OSes. Originally by Ximian which was acquired by Novell, it was later developed by Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft. In August 2024, Microsoft transferred ownership of Mono to WineHQ.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to C++:
GraalVM is a Java Development Kit (JDK) written in Java. The open-source distribution of GraalVM is based on OpenJDK, and the enterprise distribution is based on Oracle JDK. As well as just-in-time (JIT) compilation, GraalVM can compile a Java application ahead of time. This allows for faster initialization, greater runtime performance, and decreased resource consumption, but the resulting executable can only run on the platform it was compiled for.
