The goal of DotGNU Portable.NET is to build a suite of Free Software tools to compile and execute applications for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which is often referred to as ".NET".
The initial target platform was GNU/Linux, but DotGNU Portable.NET has been known to work under Windows, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, and MacOS X, amongst others. It also runs on a variety of CPUs including x86, PPC, ARM, Sparc, s390, Alpha, ia-64, and PARISC. otGNU Portable.NET is focused on compatibility with the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 specifications for C# and CLI, and with Microsoft's commercial CLI implementation. Our main goal is to make it easy to write portable application programs which work well both on DotGNU Portable.NET and on Microsoft's .NET platform. The runtime engine in DotGNU Portable.NET, called "ilrun", is used to interpret programs in the Common Intermediate Language (CIL) bytecode format, described in the ECMA-335 specifications. Because interpreting CIL bytecode directly is quite inefficient, we take a different approach. We first convert the CIL bytecode into a simpler instruction set for what we call the Converted Virtual Machine (CVM). The simpler CVM instructions are then executed using a high-performance interpreter. The CVM approach gives us many of the benefits of a Just-In-Time compiler (JIT), in that the opcodes can be tailored to handle system differences (e.g. 32-bit vs 64-bit CPU's). At the same time, the engine's source code is highly portable to new platforms. The DotGNU Portable.NET Forms implementation is structured into three layers, which are found in the source directories System.Drawing, System.Drawing/Toolkit, and System.Windows.Forms.
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