Contract RuntimeInfo

This contract encapsulates support for fetching information about the target runtime.

APIs of contract

public enum RuntimeInfoArchitecture : uint
{
    Unknown = 0,
    X86,
    Arm32,
    X64,
    Arm64,
    LoongArch64,
    RISCV,
}

public enum RuntimeInfoOperatingSystem : uint
{
    Unknown = 0,
    Win,
    Unix,
}

// Gets the targets architecture. If this information is not available returns Unknown.
RuntimeInfoArchitecture GetTargetArchitecture();

// Gets the targets operating system. If this information is not available returns Unknown.
RuntimeInfoOperatingSystem GetTargetOperatingSystem();

// Returns the runtime's RecommendedReaderVersion global. Returns 0 if the global is absent.
uint GetRecommendedReaderVersion();

// An embedded version constant indicating how much runtime functionality this reader knows how to parse.
uint GetCurrentReaderVersion();

Version 1

Global variables used:

The contract implementation returns the architecture and operating system global values parsed as the respective enum case-insensitively. If these globals are not available, the contract returns Unknown.

Reader versioning scheme

When the .NET runtime team wants to signal that an update is recommended we update both the value returned by GetCurrentReaderVersion() in the cDAC implementation and the RecommendedReaderVersion global value in the runtime. This causes older tools on older cDAC versions to observe GetRecommendedReaderVersion() > GetCurrentReaderVersion(). The tool can notify the user that an update is recommended.