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Only the ia64 version of the jit was based on msvc. And older versions of aot mode. Not the more typical jit targets.

I believe the new enabling technology for better codegen is tiered compilation, which has only been around for a couple years.

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The old JIT was a fork of a pared-back version of MSVC; this was for all platforms, except the .NET Compact framework, which was for embedded stuff, and it was its own fork.

There were other weird things like C++/CLI which was a full-fat MSVC fork used to compile C++ either into .NET IL or x86 code which could be embedded into .NET assemblies, but could still call into .NET code.

But what most people think of as .NET (Framework) was definitely using the old MSVC-based JIT

For what it’s worth, C++/CLI is not a fork, but a feature of the VC++ compiler, which still exists and supports the latest .NET versions, with the important caveats that it’s neither cross-platform nor open source.

I, for one, would love to have a cross-platform, open source C++/CLI compiler, because there is no more convenient way to consume nontrivial C++ APIs (and buggy, poorly-specified COM APIs only documented by C++ example code) in .NET.

RyuJIT has had tiered compilation for about 10 years.

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