there is no difference between "scripting" and "programming" languages. that's a totally arbitrary distinction.

mono uses jit compiling and is very optimized and lite-c is not very optimized. lite-c also only has about 50% of the performance of really optimized c-compilers like the microsoft one.

i would say mono and lite-c have about the same performance but with mono you can use more modern languages (like c# and boo) which will result in more productivity.