Recently I gave a talk at the NYAN Conference called ‘From ‘dotnet run’ to ‘hello world’: In the talk I demonstrate how you can use PerfView to analyse where the .NET Runtime is spending it’s time during start-up:

Specifically, what happens when translating a C++ raytracer and trying to make it fast.

I started by simply porting the un-obfuscated C++ code line-by-line to C#. Turns out that this was pretty straight forward, I guess the story about C# being C++++ is true after all!!

source: L

Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!

There are some significant differences between the Rotor source code and the real .NET framework. Most notably the JIT and GC are completely different implementations (due to licensing issues, listen to DotNetRocks show 360 - Ted Neward and Joel Pobar on Rotor 2.0 for more info). However, the Rotor source does give us an accurate idea about how other core parts of the CLR are implemented, such as the Type-System, Debugger, AppDomains and the VM itself. It’s interesting to compare the Rotor source with the current CoreCLR source and see how much of the source code layout and class names have remained the same.

I wouldn’t recommend reading through the entire list, at least not in one go, your brain will probably melt. Picks some posts/topics that interest you and start with those.

This is a big change for the CLR, up till now .NET methods have only been JIT compiled once, on their first usage. Tiered compilation is looking to change that, allowing methods to be re-compiled into a more optimised version much like the Java Hotspot compiler.

Now that the CoreCLR is open-source we can do fun things, for instance find out if it’s possible to add new IL (Intermediate Language) instruction to the runtime.

source: HN

It turns out that large parts of the internal implementation of arrays is best described as magic

source: L

However, I think another really useful scenario for the Interpreter is to help you learn about the inner workings of the CLR. It’s only 8,000 lines long, but it’s all in one file and most significantly it’s written in C++.

source: HN

Initialize components, components, and components.

source: L

It’s common knowledge that reflection in .NET is slow, but why is that the case? This post aims to figure that out by looking at what reflection does under-the-hood.

Slow, of course, is somewhat relative.