The Multilanguage World
In addition to the rich metadata aspect of assemblies on the .NET platform, another key characteristic is their multilanguage usability, which explains the common language part in acronyms such as CLR and Common Language Specification (CLS). As a result of this, the representation of type info and the use thereof had to be unified, too. This role is played by the Common Type System (CTS).
From this observation, it’s clear that typing is deeply baked into the runtime, leading to great benefits in the area of cross-language interoperability, runtime performance, and so on. Even though all of this sounds great, it was recognized early on that there had to be a way to allow languages that want to live a less statically typed ...
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