Are you sure you cannot use .NET? This website claims you can use .NET up to 4.5 via mono: https://mono-ue.github.io/ .
I'm in the throes of learning F# and didn't want to muddy that up by learning C++ at the same time, so thanks for alerting me to that.
edit: Hm, looks like it's unsupported as of late. A bit disappointing. May still be usable, but I'll have to dig deeper to make sure it's not a total PITA
edit2: And it seems that they've nuked the download page as well as the git repository. Oh well.