The best reference for resolving these questions is the ECMA-335 CLI standard specification. Partition II, section 24.1 defines the layout of the file format.
There are two cases that apply to any question related to cross-platform compatibility: the ideal and the real. The ideal is what was designed to occur, the real is what does occur taking into account bugs and real-world implementation variations. * Will a .NET managed executable always run on Rotor? Under what conditions will it fail? Rotor is a subset of the .NET Framework. Managed executables built under the .NET Framework that only require the functionality supported in Rotor should execute under Rotor. The Rotor CLI implementation does not support the PE files emitted by Visual C++ .NET which mix native and managed code in the same file. The Rotor CLI also does not support COM interop as another example. In reality, there will be bugs or implementation variations that cause some .NET applications that do conform to the subset of functionality supported by Rotor to fail to run or to run the same way as under .NET. We don't have a list of these and this seems fairly rare. * Is an executable generated on Rotor always in PE format? Yes. * If the answer to the above question is yes, then what is the loading process of a Rotor managed executable on FreeBSD &/or Windows? The loading process uses the clix application launcher. Clix must be used on both Windows and FreeBSD to cause the managed application to execute under Rotor. * Will every managed executable generated on Rotor (running on Windows or FreeBSD) run on .NET? Under what conditions will it fail (if at all)? Ideally, yes. There is some functionality that like the Tk/Tcl support which would not normally be supported under .NET but that's just an issue of getting all the requisite assemblies in the correct location. * Will every Rotor managed executable run on all OSes Rotor is available on? Ideally, yes. We do build and run our tests on all platforms as we develop. There have been bugs that only manifest on one platform or another. John This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
