What is IL2CPP?
The technology that we refer to as IL2CPP has two distinct parts.
- An ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler
- A runtime library to support the virtual machine
The AOT compiler translates Intermediate Language (IL),
the low-level output from .NET compilers, to C++ source code. The runtime library provides services and abstractions like a garbage collector,
platform-independent access to threads and files, and implementations of internal calls (native code which modifies managed data structures directly).
An ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler
The IL2CPP AOT compiler is named il2cpp.exe.
On Windows you can find it in the Editor\Data\il2cpp directory. On OSX it is in the Contents/Frameworks/il2cpp/build directory in the Unity installation.
The il2cpp.exe utility is a managed executable, written entirely in C#. We compile it with both .NET and Mono compilers during our development of IL2CPP.
The il2cpp.exe utility accepts managed assemblies compiled with the Mono compiler that ships with Unity and generates C++
code which we pass on to a platform-specific C++ compiler.
You can think about the IL2CPP toolchain like this:
The runtime library
The other part of the IL2CPP technology is a runtime library to support the virtual machine. We have implemented this library
using almost entirely C++ code (it has a little bit of platform-specific assembly code, but let’s keep that between the two of us).
We call the runtime library libil2cpp, and it is shipped as a static library linked into the player executable. One of the key
benefits of the IL2CPP technology is this simple and portable runtime library.
You can find some clues about how the libil2cpp code is organized by looking at the header files for libil2cpp we ship with Unity
(you’ll find them in the Editor\Data\PlaybackEngines\webglsupport\BuildTools\Libraries\libil2cpp\include directory on Windows,
or the Contents/Frameworks/il2cpp/libil2cpp directory on OSX). For example, the interface between the C++ code generated by il2cpp.exe
and the libil2cpp runtime is located in the codegen/il2cpp-codegen.h header file.
One key part of the runtime is the garbage collector. We’re shipping Unity 5 with libgc, the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector.
However, libil2cpp has been designed to allow us to use other garbage collectors. For example, we are researching an integration of the
Microsoft GC which was open-sourced as part of the CoreCLR.
