Technical Overview of the CLR (Commentary)

  

Gotta get this out of the way:

For Java to be such a recurssion heavy language, I find it hard to believe that tailcalls are not a priority for the Java Virtual Machine.

While the article is pretty relentless in its critique towards the JVM, what I find the most interesting is the actual meaning of the CLR instructions, particularily those used in imperative programming languages such as our very own Deep-Lingo. It's good to take a look at the most primitive elements of programming languages such as structs, value types, type refs, and what comprises integers and other primitives.

I still have troubles comprehending something that was said in my compiler's course. We were told that every value that can be used, written, modified, and defined in Deep-Lingo is actually an Int32 type. Sadly, although very iluminating on the nature of intermidiate languages, this article failed to help me resolve (or understand) the issues  I've been having with this idea.

Moving away from confussion, the article is pretty clear in its definition of the diferent stacks used by CLI to handle variables, values, parameters, and instructions. Not that this stage of compiling has become crystal clear for me, but this piece definitely sheds some (frankly, much needed) light on what's next.