Introduction
Microsoft has released .NET Core Run Time(CoreCLR) as an open source project on
GitHub. CoreCLR is an execution engine for .NET applications and performs functions like Intermediate Code(IL) code loading, compiling code to machine level code and garbage collection. .NET Core is part of ASP.NET 5 and subset of .NET framework which includes includes RyuJIT, the .NET GC, native interop and many other .NET run time components.
Currently .NET Core builds and runs on Windows. Over next few months Microsoft will be adding Linux and Mac platform specific components.
Fig: CoreCLR on GitHub
Building applications with .NET Core
We can build 2 types of apps
- ASP.NET 5 web apps
- Console Apps
We can build ASPNET 5 apps with .NET Framework and .NET Core. Currently ASP.NET 5 uses Mono run-time to run on non-windows OS systems. Once .NET Core support fully open source we can build these apps using .NET Core only with out Mono run-time.
Overall this release is milestone for Microsoft to make .NET available to all developers irrespective of operating system. It allows developers to build their own CoreFx binaries and CoreCLR to run their apps. Soon we will get fully open sourced .NET Core from Microsoft.
References: