Best practices for MacOS/iPhone library cross compiling

Question

I've build a static library working nice in a Cocoa Touch environment. Now I'd like to compile it also for Cocoa.. Can I have a single XCode project with different sdk targets? Is there some resource out there able to give hints about best the practices in this (and other) sense?

Answer 1

It can be done but it requires some manual tweaking of the build.

Start with the Xcode Build System Guide.

As an informal way of accomplishing this, you can create two separate projects and add references for exact same set of library source files to each project. Set one project to compile for Cocoa-Touch and the other for Cocoa. If both projects reference the same files, changes made in one project will be automatically reflected in the other. (If you have both projects open, Xcode will complain that the file has been changed by another app but otherwise it won't notice.)

I have a utility class that I continually dump new methods in. I add it to every project and just park methods as I need it. The new methods show up in old projects because the source files are shared across all the projects.

Answer 2

This last two months I have been working on exactly this task ( cross compiling static library for iPhone/Android/Mac OS/Linux/Windows...

It is certainly possible, a nice way, is adding an external xcode project as a target to your first xcode project. So you create a new "Active Configuration" for Mac OS X, iPhone and other platforms that you want to support.

Here, you can find a good tutorial about how to use a secondary Xcode project as a target of your main project to build a static library. It's a cool way because if you debug for example you still have all the symbols of the library, etc.