.NET Native

[rodi3rr4]

This question requires an OG professional but, does anyone know if .NET Native compiler was ever open source, and is the code available anywhere? As far as i know CoreRT and NativeAOT both were open source, but my guess is Microsoft didn't bother for .NET Native, and if its not open source does any developer know the insides of it? its header structure and directories? As far as I know it doesn't use R2R signature or directories.

[huoyaoyuan]

@dotnet/ilc-contrib

[jkotas]

.NET Native compiler was never open sourced. It was based on the same closed source code generator as Microsoft C/C++ compiler (codename UTC) that was never open sourced either.

Runtime used by .NET Native for UWP was open sourced as part of CoreRT project, and the open-source copy was kept in sync for a while as both projects were actively developed. Its inner workings were not fundamentally different from the current NativeAOT runtime.

https://mattwarren.org/2018/06/07/CoreRT-.NET-Runtime-for-AOT/ has good overview and links to other useful docs.

[rodi3rr4]

Is there any documentation about how the compiler creates frozen or blobs of the .NET Metadata that could help a reverse engineerer hydrate binaries. There has been one created on .NET AOT here and a ghidra plugin, the only problem is that the compiler works way differently from .NET Native (so there isn't any r2r directories or sections with opcodes as far as i know). I also asked there but didn't find an answer😞

[jkotas]

You should be able to find enough breadcrumbs in the history of CoreRT repo. The mirrored sources included definitions of .NET Native specific data structures.

here isn't any r2r directories

Take a look at ModuleHeader in rhbinder.h in dotnet/corert@ad0323a