Methods and JIT Compilation

The CLR executes only native machine code. If a method body consists of CIL, it must be translated to native machine code prior to invocation. As discussed briefly in Chapter 1, there are two options for converting CIL to native machine code. The default scenario is to postpone the translation until sometime after the component is loaded into memory. This approach is called just-in-time (JIT) compilation, or JIT-compiling for short. An alternative scenario is to generate a native image when the component is first installed on the deployment machine. This approach is called precompiling. The CLR provides a deployment tool (NGEN.EXE) and an underlying library (MSCORPE.DLL) to generate native images at deployment time. ...

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