As Microsoft continues to evolve into a mobile first cloud first company we’ve seen several developments surface, of which is their courtship of the open source community. Today, Microsoft looks to add to that with the release of CoreCLR on GitHub.
Bear with me, it’s about to get a bit technical. Microsoft has slowly been treading a path of open sourcing the full .NET Core server-side stack and today we see the release of the source code for .NET Core Common Language Runtime (CLR). Today’s release, while similar to the .NET CoreFX repo released in November, includes full CoreCLR, which is the “execution engine” for .NET Core, native interop and many other .NET runtime components. Another key difference between the two is that CoreFX is all C# and CoreCLR contains a larger collection of both C# and C++ code. While the CoreCLR requires multiple toolsets to build both C# and C++, some of which do not ship with Visual Studio, Microsoft took a dependency on CMake, an open source cross platform build system.
This willingness to use open source cross platform build systems has real world tangibility for users of Windows, Linux, and MacOS. What does it mean for you and me? Soon, ASP.NET 5 web apps and services as well as console apps can be built. These would be yet another strategy for the apps to push Microsoft’s “one” operating system further into reality.
Microsoft says, “there will be several more milestones on the path to delivering on the open source and cross-platform .NET runtime and server-side stack”, with that they also announced a virtual .NET Conference slated for March 18 & 19. Details for the conference, the release of .NET CoreCLR and other .NET news can be found at the .NET team blog or in the video post from Channel 9.
Further reading: Microsoft, Open Source
