Hacker News Reader

On .NET's case the IL is never interpreted, it is only a portable executable format.

It is either AOT compiled to native code via NGEN, Mono AOT, MDIL or .NET Native.

Or JITed on file load before actually executing the code.

The only .NET toolchain, from Microsoft, that actually does interpret IL it is .NET Micro Framework.

The idea of using bytecodes as portable execution formats goes back to mainframes, of which IBM AS/400's TIMI is the best known example.

Didn't they use to have a IL interpreter, back in the days? Or was it already a compiler-maskerading-as-an-interpreter?

No, .NET never had an interpreter phase like the JVM.

Which actually can be configured to always JIT as well.

The majority of JVMs have a non-standard flag that allows to configure how the interpreter, JIT or if supported AOT compiler work together.

This is interesting to know, thanks.