Upon starting a build using IL2CPP, Unity automatically performs the following steps:
Unity Scripting API code is compiled to regular .NET DLLs (managed assemblies).
All managed assemblies that aren’t part of scripts (such as plugins and base class libraries) are processed by a Unity tool called Unused Bytecode Stripper, which finds all unused classes and methods and removes them from these DLLs (Dynamic Link Library). This step significantly reduces the size of a built game.
Todas las managed assembiles luego son convertidas al código C++ estándar.
The generated C++ code and the runtime part of IL2CPP is compiled using a native platform compiler.
Finally, the code is linked into either an executable file or a DLL, depending on the platform you are targeting.
IL2CPP provides a few useful options which you can control by attributes in your scripts. See documentation on Platform-dependent compilation for further information.