The common language infrastructure is used in the Microsoft .NET initiative as the basis for running programs written in different programming languages. Before this Visual Basic for example has required a component VBRUN and Visual C++ uses MSVCRT for the compiled programs to run. The common language infrastructure is an effort to unify the different runtime modules needed.
It uses a virtual machine and a class library Common Language Runtime. There are many compilers beeing developed which produce code for this virtual machine.
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