Intermediate Language
The Java language introduced the concept of byte code. The evolution of programming languages dictates that some things survive and some don't. Hopefully, the good ideas are propagated and the bad ones are not.
Intermediate Language, or IL, is similar to the idea of Java byte code. If the compiled form of a programming language is general enough, the compiled code can be separated from the platform on which it runs. The idea behind Java is that the compiler creates byte code, and some other tool converts the byte code to a platform-specific version of the code that runs on that specific platform. These other tools are often referred to as JITters, from the abbreviation for JIT compilers. (JIT is an acronym for just-in-time, ...
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