ILPack: saving assemblies to disk
summary
ILPack claims to restore the missing AssemblyBuilder.Save on .NET Core by taking in-memory assemblies and emitting valid DLLs that reload unchanged, implemented by walking runtime objects via System.Reflection and emitting metadata with System.Reflection.Metadata to rebuild all tables, blobs and method bodies. It debugs invalid IL with real files using ILVerify, ILSpy/dotPeek, and is used in production at Lokad generating about 1 GB of CIL per day. Source is at https://github.com/Lokad/ILPack and the project actively handles generics, complex types and method bodies.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00ILPack introduction
- 1:25What is an assembly
- 3:10Why ILPack reverses loading
- 9:12Runtime code with Reflection.Emit
- 13:25LINQ Expressions limits
- 15:58Source generators impact
- 17:43Locat supply chain use
- 23:44Debugging assemblies need
- 29:16.NET Core gap solution
- 31:27Reflection meets Metadata APIs
- 33:35Metadata tables and IL
- 36:43Encoding method bodies
- 39:35ILPack open-source model
- 40:21Testing edge cases
- 42:10Generics metadata issues
- 43:58Backward compatibility
- 45:42Junior dev learning advice
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