Microsoft has been pushing the open source message for many months now, and today the company announced a few updates to this initiative. The Redmond-based company has taken the next step in completely open-sourcing the full .NET Core server side stack by releasing the source code for the .NET Core Common Language Runtime (CLR).
This release includes the full CoreCLR, which is the "execution engine" for .NET Core, including RyuJIT, the .NET GC, native interop and many other .NET runtime components. When you run ASP.NET 5 apps on top of .NET Core, CoreCLR is the component that is responsible for executing your code, in addition to the CoreFX/BCL libraries that you depend on.
Microsoft says that there will be several additional milestones as they work to open source and cross-platform the .NET runtime and server-side stack.
In addition to the open source announcements, Microsoft will also be hosting a virtual .NET conference on March 18th and 19th where developers can expect to hear more about .NET Core.
Open sourcing Microsoft technologies is a key step for Microsoft to show the world that it is embracing the modern development community. Previously, Microsoft kept every piece of code close to its chest, but these days, the company is much more open to the idea of community code sharing, and open sourcing CoreCLR is a small step in this process.