What is CLR and explain its role?

CLR (Common Language Runtime):

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is the virtual machine component of Microsoft's .NET framework and is responsible for managing the execution of .NET programs.

CLR will provide all the facilities and features of .NET to the Managed Code Execution like

• Language Interoperarability,
• Automatic Memory Management,
• Common Data Type System,
• Exception Handling Mechanism,
• Code Access Security etc.

The CLR provides the following benefits:

• Performance improvements.
• The ability to easily use components developed in other languages.
• Extensible types provided by a class library.
• Language features such as inheritance, interfaces, and overloading for object-oriented programming.
• Support for explicit free threading that allows creation of multithreaded, scalable applications.
• Support for structured exception handling.
• Support for custom attributes.
• Garbage collection.
• Use of delegates instead of function pointers for increased type safety and security