Hey, try to get as close as possible to native code in order to extract the most juice from the hardware. Depending on the game type, it could well be worth doing it in plain C, instead of C++, for ARM's sake. But C++, if correctly done, will have enough performance, too.

If, on the other hand, you want to use someone else's engine, you could get away with higher level languages, such as interpreted Lua or Python.

JIT based languages are not too bad either, but they do have huge memory and performance footprints. There is already a Java implementation for the N900 (IcedTea port). The Java language was an inspiration to C#, so you might find that not too difficult.

If you take a look at
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u6...t=all&lang=all you can see the relative performance for many languages, for specific programs. Notice that all of them are theoretically possible with the N900, because they all have some kind of FOSS* implementation.

Now, regarding XNA/C#, your main problem will be that it is all based on proprietary software and systems. You can only hope that those that own XNA/C# will provide a runtime that its compatible with non-Windows systems. And when you consider that Maemo, GNU/Linux and all the whole FOSS* ecosystem might be viewed by those owners (and others) as competitors, the possibility of having a full XNA/C# implementation seems bleak.

*FOSS = Free and Open Source Software

C# isnt FOR game development, it is just as good as C++, the syntax is different for C# but it is basically the same as C++.

How can you say C++ isnt suited for making games when games like Modern Warfare 2 are made using it? How did you manage to come to such a conclusion when you havent even tried.

XNA is a library made by Microsoft for game production, there is no way to port this sort of thing over because it integrates with all of the Visual Studio packages aswell.