This is a meta/placeholder issue for tracking the interest in and the work required to produce a self-contained native framework or library in .NET.

In particular we're not committing to actually implementing this, no decision has been made yet.

There are several questions that would have to be answered and solutions designed before we can even think about starting to work on this.

Open questions:

• Exactly what is exposed from managed code? Exposing only methods with the [UnmanagedCallersOnly] attribute would be the simplest, but it would also not enable some more complex scenarios (such as subclassing a managed class in Objective-C for instance).
• What happens if an app wants to use two shared libraries, built with different versions of the SDK/Runtime/etc?
• ...

Random thoughts:

• It's probably best to create a framework (and not a dylib), because dylibs only work on macOS, while frameworks work everywhere.
• We'd have to make sure it works with both MonoVM and CoreCLR.

Ref:

• Support AOT that target shared libraries on Mono for the .NET 7 time frame runtime#68775
• https://github.com/mono/Embeddinator-4000