Lesson 1 of 11 in the free .NET Internals — CLR, CTS, CLS, IL, JIT, Memory Management & Garbage Collection course on DevLadder.
Mono (2004, open source, by Ximian → Xamarin → Microsoft) ran .NET on Linux/macOS/mobile and powers Unity and Xamarin; today its runtime is used inside .NET for mobile and WebAssembly.
Interview tip: "Why did they skip .NET 4?" — to avoid confusion with .NET Framework 4.x; .NET 5 dropped "Core" from the name because it became the .NET going forward.
The Common Language Runtime is .NET's execution engine. It loads assemblies, verifies type safety, JIT-compiles IL to native code, manages memory with the garbage collector, handles exceptions, threads and synchronisation, provides interop with native code and exposes debugging/profiling services. Code running under it is "managed code".
Source: DEV - interview — Read the full article on the original site ↗