Self-contained CLI Assemblies

High-level programming languages and bytecode-based virtual execution environments have become popular in software development. Bytecode-based runtimes extend embedded system by techniques to improve safety, help portability and interoperability. The ECMA/ISO Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specifies a bytecodebased execution environment (Common Language Runtime) and a comprehensive class library. CLI applications suffer from long startup time, high memory consumption and the amount of referenced assemblies. Startup time is determined by resolving references and high memory consumption through big class library assemblies. Often CLI applications use a small subset of the CLI class library, but the whole memory footprint is basically determined by the class library. To overcome memory requirements of the class library, a minimal application format that includes all essential class library functionality is reasonable. Self-contained CLI assemblies as an approach for size-optimized deployment format are presented in this paper.