[Mono-dev] How do I develop mono/C# applications for the Apple iPhone?

[Miguel de Icaza]

> So, what does one need to build applications for the iphone in C#?

The current setup is less than ideal.   I would love to fix this, but we
ourselves have too much in our plate right now to take on more tasks.

The things that are needed are:

	* To create a better setup to build the Mono cross compiler, to
	  avoid some of the pain of having to run a Mono ARM under
	  emulation to generate the assembly code before it is linked in
	  and compiled.

	* Hopefully a Mono "cross-compiling" set of patches so that 
	  Mono can compiled on Intel machines to generate ARM code.

	  This is doable, but will take some time to get it done. 
	  Unity has some patches that do this, but I am not sure we
	  received those patches back, and I believe the rumor was
	  that they were not complete enough for integration into
	  Mono itself.  

	  For the code to go into Mono, the patch would have to be
	  "the right one".

	* Bindings to the Cocoa interface.   The current approach
	  used by most Cocoa bindings for Mono/OSX depends on 
	  reflection.emit to generate code dynamically.   

	  None of those will work with Apple's requirements that 
	  the code do not use JITing.   

	  There is a binding out there that uses full static code
	  but it is GPLed, which will be incompatible with 
	  anything but GPL applications.

Miguel.