Books and literature for implementing a language on the CLR

Question

I'm looking for books and literature on the inner workings of the CLR (and/or possibly the DLR), my long time goal is to implement a simple language on the CLR.

Answer 1

I would imagine the source code for Mono might have something to say about that. The C# compiler is itself written in C#, and source code is available.

Answer 2

A few starters for the CLR:

• CLR via C# (soon to have an update for v4) (Jeff Richter)
• ECMA 335
• Essential .NET volume 1 (Don Box et al) - doesn't cover .NET 2.0, but a good starting point

The DLR itself is Open Source, and its documentation is pretty handy.

Answer 3

I'm not sure about the DLR, but here's some open source .NET languages that you can look at the source code for to see how they do it:

• Boo - A Python-like language
• LOLCode - Pretty much a joke, but it could still provide some info for you

I'll post more if I can remember any others...

Answer 4

IronPython and IronRuby are open source implementations on top of the DLR (itself open sourced on Codeplex); and some IronPython releases included a ToyScript language which was meant to serve as an example for general DLR language implementation -- it may still be part of the DLR bundle these days.

Answer 5

Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

Answer 6

Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler could also be useful as it describes a lot of the details for .NET applications.