SSCLI: Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure

The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is the ECMA standard that describes the core of the .NET Framework. The Shared Source CLI (SSCLI), also known as Rotor, is a compressed archive of the source code to a working implementation of the ECMA CLI and the ECMA C# language specification, technologies at the heart of Microsoft’s .NET architecture. Since 2002, SSCLI has been used in scores of research and teaching projects around the world, enabling work in the areas of memory management, garbage collection, virtual object systems, just-in-time compilation, and code security, among others.

SSCLI 2.0, released in March 2006, adds full support for the latest CLI and C# 2.0 features, such as anonymous methods, anonymous delegates, and generics; BCL additions; Lightweight Code Generation (LCG); and stub-based dispatch.

SSCLI contains these technologies in source code form:

• An implementation of the runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (ECMA-335)
• Compilers that work with the SSCLI for C# (ECMA-334) and JScript
• Development tools for working with the SSCLI, such as assembler and disassemblers (ilasm, ildasm), a debugger (cordbg), metadata introspection (metainfo)
• The Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL) used to port the SSCLI from Windows to other platforms
• Build environment tools (nmake, build, and others)
• Test suites used to verify the implementation
• A rich set of sample code and tools for working with the SSCLI