Technical Overview of the CLR

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about an article called “Technical Overview of the Common Language Runtime (or why the JVM is not my favorite execution environment) written by Erik Meijer and Kim Miller in 2001. Basically, it talks about how in the past years, some language researchers moved to JVM as kind of the delivery vehicle for their language. We know that JVM is a really good target for the Java programming language, but it is not necessarily a good platform for other languages (making an emphasis in the ones that require semantic features that do not appear in Java). And here is when and why the author introduces to us the new Microsoft .NET Common Language Infrastructure (or CLI), designed from the ground to be a multi-language platform. 
I want to mention one thing that seemed curious to me, the authors of this paper are Microsoft members (or at least that’s what I saw in their emails at the start of the article). This aspect made me think that obviously, as the authors are people inside Microsoft and CLI is developed by Microsoft, they will talk good about this platform comparing them with JVM (a system developed by their competence).
This paper was just kind of a list of the pros and good aspects of CLI, but there wasn’t a true comparison between CLI and JVM. I only saw the main characteristics and pros of CLI, but there wasn’t any pro or good aspect about JVM, and I found this pretty related with the fact that the paper was written by Microsoft members. Why would they talk good about their competence? I would like this paper to be less subjective and to be done by someone external to those companies and doing real compassion. Also, this topic wasn´t very interesting for me, because as I already mentioned, it just talks about good things about CLI.


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