Re: cross compile to MacOS

[Robert Heller]

At Sat, 21 Nov 2020 14:48:16 -0500 Zach Bacon <wowzaman12@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> In theory, yes it's possible but like what Robert mention, it's a 
> different beast than targeting windows platforms and to be honest I 
> don't think it would be beneficial to work on such a solution, 
> especially where you run into issues where you need to ensure the binary 
> can work and without a working macOS platform to test that sort of 
> thing, honestly I think a lot of compilation tests could potentially 
> fail because of that. At least targeting windows platforms using mxe you 
> have things like wine to test your binaries on.

A major problem (as I mentioned) is that Apple has put *special* effort into
making it hard to coss-build for MacOSX and hard to even run MacOSX on
anything other then a genuine Macintosh, both at the bare level or as a vm.
Apple makes money selling their hardware. They pretty much give their software
away, but with the gotcha: you gotta buy the hardware to actually run the
software.

> 
> On 2020-11-21 2:18 p.m., Robert Heller wrote:
> > At Sat, 21 Nov 2020 19:58:23 +0100 Valerio Messina <efa@iol.it> wrote:
> >
> >> hi,
> >> I'm using MXE with satisfaction and can generate for Win32 and 64.
> >>
> >> I want to cross compile my CLI, SDL and GTK applications for MacOS too.
> >> I looked around and found some cross-compiler for MacOS, but all require
> >> to download and install the Apple SDK (many GB), and some are not
> >> maintained anymore.
> >>
> >> Reading the MXE Introduction say it can cross compile for various target
> >> platforms, but as now seem only Win32 and Win64 are supported.
> >> Since CLI, SDL and GTK are natively cross-platform, and MacOS is quite
> >> similar to Linux (it is already supported as host), I hope no Apple SDK
> >> is needed.
> > MacOSX is layered on BSD (a variant called Darwin), which is POSIX (like
> > Linux).  Apple is rather protective of MacOSX, patitularly the non-free
> > parts.
> >
> >> Are there any chance that MXE will extended to support MacOS as target?
> > Highly unlikely -- MacOSX is a very different animal from Win32 and Win64. 
> > To
> > have any chance of properly supporting MacOSX, partularly the current 
> > version,
> > you will have to get an actual Mac -- most likely you option is get a 
> > MacMini,
> > which can be networked and ssh'ed into from a Linux machine (shell / CLI
> > access) and/or use a VNCViewer if you need to use the MacOSX GUI (eg testing
> > GTK apps). And running MacOSX in a virtual machine is a very tricky business
> > -- said to be possible, but you need to first create a virtual "Hackintosh",
> > which is somewhat non-tivial.
> >
> > The build tools for MacOSX are freely available from Apple, but they are 
> > only
> > meant to run on an actual Mac.
> >
> >> thank you for this good software,
> 
>                                                                              
> 

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