Managed and Unmanaged Code

Question

State the difference between Managed and Unmanaged Code?

Answer 1

a) Managed code is defined as the code that is executed directly by the CLR in place of the operating system. The code compiler firstly compiles the managed code and converts it to the intermediate language (IL) code, which is also called as MSIL code. This code doesn't depend upon the machine configurations and it can be executed over different machines. Unmanaged code is the code which is executed directly by operating system outside the CLR environment. It is directly compiled to native machine code that depends upon the configuration of the machine.

b) In the Managed code , as the execution of the code is administered by the CLR, the runtime offers different services, such as garbage collection, exception handling, type checking, and security support. Such services help to offer uniformity in platform and language-independent behaviour of managed code applications.
In the Unmanaged code , type safety, the allocation of memory, and security is needed to be taken care of by the developer. If the unmanaged code is not appropriately handled, it might result in memory leak. Samples of unmanaged code are:  ActiveX components and Win32 APIs which execute beyond the scope of native CLR.