Is the CLR a virtual machine?

Question

I read a book which referred to the .net CLR as a virtual machine? Can anyone justify this? What is the reason we need the concept of virtual machines on so

Answer 1

Neither the JVM nor the CLR do anything that is materially different than what most "virtual machines" for other languages also do. Modernly, they all use JIT to convert virtual instructions (p-code, bytecodes, intermediate language instructions, call it whatever you like) to "native CPU hardware" instructions ("machine code.")

In fact, the first "virtual machine" to do this was the Smalltalk virtual machine. The author of that innovation, Peter Deutsch, dubbed it "dynamic translation" instead of the term "JIT," which was popularized by Java. If the Smalltalk "runtime execution environment" is going to be called a "virtual machine" (and that's what it's still called,) then any and all other "run time systems" that do essentially the same thing also qualify as "virtual machines."