.NET Core components

.NET Core, being a general-purpose application-development platform, is made up of CoreCLR, CoreFX, SDK and CLI tools, application host, and dotnet application launcher:

The CoreCLR, also known as .NET Core Runtime, is at the heart of the .NET Core and is a cross-platform implementation of the CLR; the original .NET Framework CLR has been refactored to produce the CoreCLR. The CoreCLR, which is the Common Language Runtime, manages usage and references to objects, communication and interactions of objects written in different programming languages supported in, and performs garbage collection by releasing objects from memory when they are no longer in use. The CoreCLR comprises of the following:

• Garbage collector
• Just in Time (JIT) compiler
• Native interop
• Base .NET types

CoreFX is a set of framework or foundational libraries of the .NET Core and it provides primitive datatypes, filesystems, application composition types, consoles, and basic utilities. The CoreFX contains a streamlined library of classes.

.NET Core SDK contains a set of tools including command-line interface (CLI) tools and compilers for the different languages supported, used for building applications and libraries to run on .NET Core. The SDK tools and language compilers provide functionalities to make coding easier and faster by giving developers easy access to language components supported by CoreFX libraries.

In order to launch a .NET Core application, the dotnet application host is the component responsible for the selection and hosting of the required runtime for the application. .NET Core has a console application as the main application model and other application models, such as ASP.NET Core, Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform, and Xamarin Forms.