The dot net foundation has released a lot of the language components, this appears to be a different compilation target.

It looks like this project skips the common intermediate language, and compiles straight to native processor code or Web Assembly (Ahead of Time compilation).

You get to skip the overhead of Just In Time compilation.

> common intermediate language

I think you are referring to MSIL

Nope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Intermediate_Language

Common Intermediate Language is the standard name for MSIL.

I would also appreciate a little comment on this because the readme doesn't do much explaining what it is, why it's important, how it's different from .NET Core 2 compiler? To put it in another way, why is this so relevant?

It is the POSIX version of .NET Native, for AOT compilation into native code.

Using a much better compiler backend than NGEN, similar to Mono when targeting iOS.

Additionally, it is also adding WASM as target "CPU".

.NET Core only does JIT currently, the generated binary is a mini-bootstrap code that starts the runtime and feeds the main application Assembly into it.

Thanks for the explanation. It’s good to see that Microsoft finally decided to port .net native to other platforms than uwp.

Seems like this can/will target webassembly.

The is already a partial backend for webassembly in the repo.