Compile Objective-C On An Apple Mac Server [closed]

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As ,AFAIK, there is no way to compile Objective-C on a Windows machine. Would it be reasonably easy to set up a Mac server that compiles everything for you.

I am writing a game making system and it generates Objective-C code for you and creates an XCode project file. I was just wondering if I could give users the ability to compile there projects through server.

Could I setup a server that compiles XCode reasonably easily or are there services already available which I can direct users to that already do this?

I am aware of DragonFireSDK but that is for DragonFireSDK and not for third-party software, ASFAIK. I would think that they would try to make you buy DragonFireSDK to use there server for compilation.

Please note that I do not expect to find any servers where they compile Objective-C for you but I am hoping there are paid services that do this for you.

Please not I have literally just about no knowledge or experience of servers and/or server programming.

Thanks

Answer 1

Recently, I was looking to do the same thing. I develop for jailbroken devices. In our community, lots of people that can't afford Macs use Linux for building their projects. I see it quite a bit.

Clang/LLVM and Apple's ld64 are used to compile and link Objective-C projects. Luckily, all three are open source, meaning that you can use them on just about any UNIX-based OS. (I think Clang/LLVM supports Windows too, but I doubt ld64 does)

There are many toolchains people have put together to build iOS projects on non-Mac operating systems. You can Google them.

Darling

My personal favorite is the Darling project. It is similar to Wine in that it allows you to run Mac OS X binaries on Linux. When used in conjunction with Apple's toolchain that comes with Xcode, it works wonderfully, much better than any other toolchain. Also, since Apple has yet to commit arm64 support to Clang/LLVM (it's still closed source), this method still allows you to compile for arm64. It's also pretty reliable, in that you'll be able to update your toolchain the second Apple releases a new version, without having to wait for the source code.

I use Darling in my server for copy protection. When someone purchases my product, my server builds a copy specifically for them, embedding their device information in it. That way, if it is pirated, I can see "who dun it". It currently builds 5-6 copies a minute when sales are high, and so far, it has handled the strain just fine.

I've written a (somewhat long) tutorial for setting up Darling on Linux. It's targeted toward jailbroken development, but I'm sure you can adapt it to suit your needs.