Are there any advantages in the CIL byte code over Java bytecode?
The CIL has some advantages over the Java byte code: The existence of structs in addition to classes helps a lot the performance and minimizes the memory footprint of applications. Generics in the CLI world are first-class citizens, they are not just a strong-typing addition to the language. The generic specifications are embedded into the instruction stream, the JIT uses this information to JIT a unique instances of a method that is optimized for the type arguments. The CIL is really an intermediate representation and there are a number of restrictions on how you can emit CIL code that simplify creating better JIT engines. For example, on the CIL, the stack is not really an abstraction available for the code generator to use at will. Rather, it is a way of creating a postfix representation of the parsed tree. At any given call point or return point, the contents of the stack are expected to contain the same object types independently of how the instruction was reached.
