How to compile a program for distribution on Mac.

Question

I am developing a program on OSX 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard), and I want to be able to run the compiled product on other Intel Macs, some of whom may not have XCode isntalled.

To simplify things, I first wrote a Hello World program.

#include<stdio.h>
int main() {
    printf("Hello world!\n");
    return 0;
}

If I compile it as

gcc -static prog.c

I get the folllowing error:

ld: library not found for -lcrt0.o

I don't know where to find this library. Now, some people have mentioned that I should not compile statically on macs since the system shared libraries should be available everywhere (third party libraries can be manually linked). However, when I try to run this Hello World program on another mac, I get the folowing error:

 dyld: unknown required load command 0x80000022
 Trace/BPT trap

So, how do you compile a program on mac so that it can be distributed? I am not having architecture issues, as most computers I am interested in are Intel Macs.

Answer 1

Don't use -static. Your executable will run fine on other 10.6.x x86 Macs. If you want to deploy on pre-10.6 Macs then you'll need to use the appropriate SDK but apart from that it should "just work", regardless of whether the developer tools are installed.

Answer 2

It might be worth using XCode to create your executable, using the Command Line program template (basic Unix executables), simply because it will manage a lot of the compiler options for you (including which SDK you are compiling against / which versions you are targeting).

My guess is that a default commmand-line compilation is going to compile against the current system libraries (10.6.4).