Is the CLR a virtual machine?

Question

I read a book which referred to the .net CLR as a virtual machine? Can anyone justify this? What is the reason we need the concept of virtual machines on so

Answer 1

The advantage of the CLR is the freedom to write code in whatever programming language the developer chooses, since the code will be compiled down to CLR before being interpreted into native calls. The .NET framework uses this JIT compilation to treat everything uniformly and output programs which work for the platform being deployed on, which is absent from compiled languages.