What Is Intermediate Language (IL)?

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Intermediate Language (IL) are like the middle of a sandwich. They're between you and the meat, which can be good or bad. The IL is the IL for a reason. It's the middleman between your code and the machine—the place where all that fancy .NET Framework magic happens. The IL is used to generate machine-independent code as the output of the compilation of the source code written in any .NET programming language. IL is a language used to write instructions for the virtual machine that executes programs. It's called IL because it's inspired by how we talk about English: "I love you!" becomes "ILU." But unlike English, IL is a stack-based language. That means that every time you want to do something, you have to take data off of one place on your stack and put it in another place on your stack. If you want to add two numbers together, you need to grab both numbers from their places on the stack and put them in another place on the stack together—that last part is where they get added together! It's called IL because it gets converted into bytecode during the execution of a virtual machine. Because of this conversion process, there is no need to learn its syntax—you have to understand what happens during the execution of a virtual machine. It's easy to think of IL as Java bytecode's less-talented sister, but that's a mistake. These two languages may have similar parents (the JVM) but have very different personalities. Java bytecode is designed for platform independence and language independence. Any JVM-based programming language can use it—but only if it's compiled. IL, on the other hand, is a language in its own right—and it's designed for nothing more than portability across platforms and languages. So, while Java bytecode can be used as a compilation target for any number of languages, IL is truly only useful when combined with an IL-compiler like Mono or dotnetcairo.

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