How is COSMOS possible?

I just saw that COSMOS is an OS written in MSIL la开发者_如何学Pythonngage, and I just wonder how that is possible? I always thought that MSIL needed a CLR to work, and CLR needed an OS behind it.

Thanks for explanations.

I refer you to the second and third sentences of the Wikipedia article on COSMOS, which I reproduce for you here:

Cosmos is an open source operating system written in C#. It also encompasses a compiler (IL2CPU) for converting Common Intermediate Language (.NET) bytecode into native instructions. The operating system is compiled together with a user program and associated libraries using IL2CPU to create a bootable standalone native binary