Curious to see how .NET Native would compare given it is using the same backend as VC++ .
What do you mean by .NET Native?
He does compare .NET C# with the managed C++ extensions (terminology?) and managed C++ does pretty well, just a whisker away from full on low-level C++. And several times faster than C#.
.NET Native is compiled C#. You can think of it as pre-JITted platform -dependent C#. It is still managed, imposing memory safety through runtime bound checks (unless optimized out) and garbage collection. The project is preparing to be open sourced, it seems. For now you can read about it on MSDN.
The CoreFX project on github is part of the Common .NET implementation which includes Native, the new ASP.NET, etc.
Well they are experimenting with LLVM, as a backend for CIL.. So maybe this is a sign that they will not open source their VC++ backend and instead go with this LLILC [1] project for the AOT compilation target?