The idea is that you can pass an option like --aot=foo=bar,baz="abc\"def\",xyz=012 and the AOT compiler will see options foo=bar, baz=abc"def and zyx=012.

But this line that is supposed to handle the character following a \ is wrong

it never resets the state back to MONO_AOT_OPTION_STATE_STRING, so everything after the \ until the end of the options is treated as a single long option: foo=bar, baz=abc\"def",xyz=012

Also the \ is itself never removed from the option - instead of bar=abc"def we get bar=abc\"def. (And this is a hard problem because we woudl need to copy or modify the string, which we don't otherwise do)