Alternative languages with MonoTouch

Question

MonoTouch is always mentioned along with C#. Are the framework and toolset actually limited to C#, or do other CLR languages like IronRuby and F# work as well?

Emiliaemiliaromagna

Answer 1

It's not limited to C#, but there are a few caveats to running other languages:

• dynamic code generation (reflection emit) isn't possible on iPhone, so IronPython and IronRuby won't work
• if the compiler generates code that depends on APIs that don't exist on MonoTouch, such as the VB.NET runtime library, those APIs/libraries will need to be ported
• The compiler must be able to target a custom framework/corlib - though MonoTouch's core fx is the same as silverlight, so any SL-targeting compiler should work out of the box. I'm sure you could do some trivial retargetting of assembly references with a tool such as Cecil too.

Delphi Prism is known to work - their MonoDevelop addin even has MonoTouch support. Other statically compiled .NET languages should generally be fairly easy to port.

Fructuous

Answer 2

Novell is kinda vague on this point, they say: "MonoTouch is a software development kit for Mac OS X that lets you use .NET programming languages".

It seems that simple F# programs like Hello-world are working, see this post: http://jamesmoorecode.blogspot.com/2009/09/f-running-on-iphone.html

And because IronRuby is built on top of the DLR and since Novell do not support the DLR for MonoTouch, IronRuby should not work.

Filaria

Thanks for your very helpful answer. I +1'd. – Emiliaemiliaromagna

To make things a little easier for F# inside MonoDevelop, I just posted a rakefile at git://github.com/banshee/fsharp_rakefile.git – Araminta