Fusion is one of the most importants features among ones in the runtime implementation of CLI.
In the fusion, or any other components or modules, how to retrieve the execution engine instance and how to generate such engine?
UtilExecutionEngine, implemented as COM object, support Queryinterface/AddRef/Release, and exposed via interface IExecutionEngine.
With SELF_NO_HOST defined,
BYTE g_ExecutionEngineInstance[sizeof(UtilExecutionEngine)];
g_ExecutionEngineInstance would be the singleton instance of current execution engine,
otherwise, without SELF_NO_HOST, the 'sscoree' dll would be loaded and try to get the exported function, which is named 'IEE' from such dll. Here, it is the well-known shim, in .net CLR, such module is named 'mscoree'. Further, if 'IEE' could not be found in such dll, system would try to locate another exported function, named 'LoadLibraryShim', and use such function to load the 'mscorwks' module, and try to locate the 'IEE' exportd functionin it.
It's very obvious that Rotor has implemented its own execution engine, but it also gives or make space for implementation of execution engine from 3rd party. Here, .net CLR is a good candidate definitely, Rotor might load the mscorwks.dll module for its usage.
PAL, PALAPI, for example, HeapAlloc, one famous WIN32 API, has been implemented as one PALAPI (defined in Heap.c), to make it possible that the CLI/Rotor be ported smoothly to other OS, such freebsd/mac os.
CRT routines are also reimplemented, such as memcpy, it has been implemented as GCSafeMemCpy
There're many macros in fuctions, such as SCAN_IGNORE_FAULT/STATIC_CONTRACT_NOTHROW/STATIC_CONTRACT_NOTRIGGER, they are for static analysis tool to scan, analyse and figour out the potential issues in code.
From view point of the execution model by CLI, the act of compiling (including JIT) high-level type descriptions would be separated from the act of turning these type descriptions into processor-specific code and memory structures.
And such executino model, in other word, the well-known 'managed execution', would defer the loading, verification and compilation of components until runtime really needs; At the same time, the type-loading is the key trigger that causes CLI's tool chain to be engaged at runtime. Deferred compilation(lead to JIT)/linking/loading would get better portability to different target platform and be ready for version change; The whole deferred process would driven by well-defined metadata and policy, and it would be very robust for building a virtual execution environment;
At the top of such CLI tool chain, fusion is reponsible for not only finding and binding related assemblies, which are via assembly reference defined in assembly, fusion also takes another important role, loader, and its part of functionality is implemented in PEAssembly, ClassLoader classes. For example, ClassLoader::LoadTypeHandleForTypeKey.
For types in virtual execution environment of CLI, rotor defines four kinds of elements for internal conducting,
ELEMENT_TYPE_CLASS for ordinary classes and generic instantiations(including value types);
ELEMENT_TYPE_ARRAY AND ELEMENT_TYPE_SZARRAY for array types
ELEMENT_TYPE_PRT and ELEMENT_TYPE_BYREF for pointer types
ELEMENT_TYPE_FNPTR for function pointer types
every type would be assigned unique ulong-typed token, and such token would be used to look up in m_TypeDefToMethodTableMap (Linear mapping from TypeDef token to MethodTable *)which is maintained by current module; If there it is, the pointer to method table of such type would be retrieved, or it would look up in the loader module, where the method table should exist in while it's JIT loaded, not launched from NGEN image;
And all the unresolved typed would be maintained in a hash table, PendingTypeLoadTable; Types and only those types that are needed, such as dependencies, including parent types, are loaded in runtime, such type is fully loaded and ready for further execution, and other unresolved types would be kept in the previous hash table.