When I was looking at the documentation on how to integrate mono into our c++ application, I was running into an issue where the application crashed every time I try to initialize mono. A simple search on the internet did not return any immediate results and I went to look for tutorials on how to setup a project in visual studio 2015 and mono. I thought it was my vs settings.

After looking at some of the sites, I came across this embed sample which have a simple visual studio project. After some inspection, I realized that the problem with the tutorial on mono-projects did not mention about setting the directory of your mono binary/library.

Finally I just did what the embed sample did and make a copy of mono into my project directory and call mono_set_dirs.

TL;DR if mono_jit_init crashes, be sure to call mono_set_dirs before and have mono in your project directory.