The major difference is that the CLR is aware of generics rather them being a compiler trick as they are with the JVM. Don Syme (father of F#, who also worked o

The major difference is that the CLR is aware of generics rather them being a compiler trick as they are with the JVM. Don Syme (father of F#, who also worked on the implementation of generics in the CLR) did a talk explaining the history and how they almost shipped with erased generics like the JVM. On the other hand, it's been claimed that erased generics have made things easier for implementing other languages on the platform, so there are tradeoffs I guess. Having used both I would take the CLR implementation any day.