Embedding Mono on iOS

Question

I want to embed mono into my iOS application. I do not want to use MonoTouch. I want to embed mono manually like this:

http://www.mono-project.com/Embedding_Mono

I've have done this successfully on windows, using the above guide and various online examples, here's a good Windows one:

https://github.com/inkdev/Embedded-Mono-Sample

However I'm having trouble getting started on iOS. I know it can be done, companies like Unity3d use it to power their game engine tech. I can't work out how to compile and link mono for iOS nor can I find any good instructions to do so. I've not found any help using search engines, they exclusively seem to turn up articles about MonoTouch (Xamarin's own commercial wrapper around embedding mono into iOS).

Here's a few more noteworthy links:

http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:ARM

http://web.archive.org/web/20090106023130/http://mono-project.com./Mono:Iphone

Is there somewhere I can get precompiled libraries and headers for Mono for iOS, so in my C code I can simply link and include?

Could someone provide and example of how to compile mono for iOS ARM CPUs?

MonoTouch provides a great wrapper around all of the iOS Objective C APIs, however you don't necessarily need all of that, as I understand it should be possible to compile and then embed mono yourself and then use pInvoke to call the few native functions you will need.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, ty!

Answer 1

While not exactly what you are asking for, iOS 7 has added support for scripting with JavaScript. Many people finding this post may want to use this new capability to achieve what you are attempting. Link