Today, Native Image Generator is an issue that is present in all spheres of society. From politics to pop culture, Native Image Generator has become a constant talking point. This trend has led to an increase in attention and interest in Native Image Generator, both from experts and laypeople. In this article, we will explore the various aspects of Native Image Generator, from its historical origins to its impact on the world today. We will analyze how Native Image Generator has evolved over time and examine its influence in different areas. Additionally, we will discuss the future implications of Native Image Generator and how it can affect our lives in the future.
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The Native Image Generator, or simply NGen, is the ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) service of the .NET Framework.[1] It allows a CLI assembly to be pre-compiled instead of letting the Common Language Runtime (CLR) do a just-in-time compilation (JIT) at runtime. In some cases the execution will be significantly faster than with JIT.
The Native Image Generator produces a native binary image for the current environment (i.e.; operating systems). This eliminates the JIT overhead at the expense of portability and disk space; whenever an NGen-generated image is run in an incompatible environment, .NET Framework automatically reverts to using JIT. Once NGen is run against an assembly, the resulting native image is placed into the Native Image Cache (NIC) for use by all other CLI assemblies. This makes it possible, for example, to use NGen to process CLI assemblies at installation time, saving processor time later on, when the end-user invokes the application on their system.
NGen is intended to make the assembly execute faster by removing the JIT compilation process at runtime, but this does not always improve performance because some optimizations can be done only by a JIT compiler (e.g., if the JIT compiler knows that the code is already running with full trust, it can skip certain expensive security checks). Because of this fact, it makes sense to use NGen only after benchmarking the application performance before and after it.