How is Reflection implemented in C#?

Question

I got curious as to where Type.GetType() is implemented, so I took a peek at the assembly and noticed Type.GetType() calls base.GetType()

Answer 1

As @GlennFerrieLive points out, the call to GetType is an InternalCall which means the implementation is within the CLR itself and not in any of the BCL.

My understanding is that the internal CLR method takes the runtime type information from the this pointer, which basically amounts to the name of the type. It then look up the complete type information from the metadata present in all loaded assemblies (presumably, in the current appdomain), which is what makes reflection rather expensive. The metadata area is basically a database of all the types and members present in the assembly and it constructs an instance of Type or Method|Property|FieldInfo from this data.