Hacker News Reader

Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing of C#, but there are a lot of comparisons to Java in this thread. Does C# have anything comparable to the JVM? That is, does anything compile to C# bytecode, if there is such a thing?

View on HN

Microsoft don't like to admit it but C# and the CLR are their direct response loosing a lawsuit to Sun taht made them stop developing their own versions of Java and the JVM.

So Microsoft got the luxury of being able to go back to the drawing board and try to "do Java right". At least with the knowledge gained from developing Java in the 90s.

Plus they hired a veteran language designer to lead the effort -- Anders Hejlsberg. Compared to Java they were unapologetic in rapidly iterating the language and much more aggressive about borrowing ideas from research.

Arguably it came full circle in Java 8, which was a big update to the language.

Yes, since the get-go .NET has targeted a VM called the CLR (the common language runtime). The biggest difference between the JVM and the CLR (initially) was that Microsoft designed the CLR to be mutli-language, whereas the JVM was written "just for java".

Yes. The CLR (Common Language Runtime) is like the JVM and support multiple languages, hence the name.

C# compiles to Common Intermediate Language (CIL) which is then assembled into a form of bytecode.

TIL MSIL is now called CIL. What the hell!

It has been called CIL close to a decade now..

The first edition of ECMA-335 was published December 2001, so now almost two!

Yep, that was the most surprising thing to me. In my circles people have just continued calling it MSIL all this time and I’ve never questioned it or needed to research anything MSIL related so I guess it slipped past me all this time. Hence the “what the hell!”

MSIL is Microsoft's implementation of the open standard CIL, which has been open for over a decade, and is how Mono even works.

That explains a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com