I would like to port my C/C++ apps to OS X.
I don't have a Mac, but I have Linux and Windows. Is there any tool for this?
For Linux, there is a prebuilt GCC cross-compiler (from publicly available Apple's modified GCC sources).
https://launchpad.net/~flosoft/+archive/cross-apple
Update for 2015
After so many years, the industry-standard IDE now supports OSX/iOS/Android.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Connect-event-2014/311
Embarcadero's RadStudio also supports building OSX/iOS/Android apps on Windows.
This answer by Thomas also provides a cross-compilation tool.
For all these options you still need a real mac/i-device to test the application.
I have created a project called OSXCross which aims to target OS X (10.4-10.9) from Linux.
It currently supports clang 3.2 up to 3.8 (trunk) (you can use your dist's clang).
In addition you can build an up-to-date vanilla GCC as well (4.6+).
LTO works as well, for both, clang and GCC.
Currently using cctools-870 with ld64-242.
https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
There appears to be some scripts that have been written to help get you set up cross compiling for the Mac; I can't say how good they are, or how applicable to your project. In the documentation, they refer to these instructions for cross-compiling for 10.4, and these ones for cross compiling for 10.5; those instructions may be more helpful than the script, depending on how well the script fits your needs.
If your program is free or open source software, then you may wish instead to create a MacPorts portfile (documentation here), and allow your users to build your program using MacPorts; that is generally the preferred way to install portable free or open source software on Mac OS X. MacPorts has been known to run on Linux in the past, so it may be possible to develop and test your Portfile on Linux (though it will obviously need to be tested on a Mac).
Get "VMware Player"
Get "Mac OS X vm image"
Compile/Debug/Integrate-and-test your code on the new OS to make sure everything works
When you are trying to get something working on multiple platforms you absolutely must compile/run/integrate/test on the intended platform. You can not just compile/run on one platform and then say "oh it should work the same on the other platform".
Even with the a really good cross-platform language like Java you will run into problems where it won't work exactly the same on the other platform.
The only way I have found that respects my time/productivity/ability-to-rapidly iterate on multiple platforms is to use a VM of the other platforms.
There are other solutions like dual-boot and ones that I haven't mentioned but I find that they don't respect my productivity/time.
Take dual-booting as an example:
I make a change on OS 1
reboot into OS 2
forget something on OS 1
reboot into OS 1
make a change on OS 1
reboot into OS 2 ... AGAIN...
BAM there goes 30 minutes of my time and I haven't done anything productive.
You would need a toolchain to cross compile for mach-o, but even if you had that, you won't have the Apple libraries around to develop with. I'm not sure how you would be able to port without them, unfortunately.
Apple development is a strange beast unto itself. OS X uses a port of GCC with some modifications to make it 'appley'. In theory, it's possible to the the sources to the Apple GCC and toolchain as well as the Apple kernel and library headers and build a cross compiler on your Windows machine.
Why you'd want to go down this path is beyond me. You can have a cheap Mac mini from $600. The time you invest getting a cross compiler working right (particularly with a Windows host for Unix tools) will probably cost more than the $600 anyway.
If you're really keen to make your app cross platform look into Qt, wxWidgets or FLTK. All provide cross-platform support with minimal changes to the base code. At least that way all you need to do is find a Mac to compile your app on, and that's not too hard to do if you have some technically minded friends who don't mind giving you SSH access to their Mac.
You will definitely need OS X somehow. Even if you don't own a Mac, you can still try some alternatives.
I found this small documentation on the net:
http://devs.openttd.org/~truebrain/compile-farm/apple-darwin9.txt
This describes exactly what you want. I am interested in it myself, haven't tested it yet though (found it 10 minutes ago). The documentation seems good, though.
You can hire a mac in the cloud from this website. You can hire them from $1, which should be enough (unless you need root access, then you are looking at $49+).
There are a few cross-compiler setups, but nearly all of them are meant for distcc-style distributed compiling. To my knowledge there is no way to directly target the Mac platform without actually having a Mac. The closest you can get without resorting to QT or wxWidgets is OpenStep with GNUStep or similar, but that's not a true Cocoa platform, just very close.
I know this question isn’t very active but answering anyways. Why don’t you try using TransMac, then download the XCode image and do it that way? Or you can use a VM, or Sosumi. You’ll find a video on youtube about sosumi, definitely.
The short answer is kind of. You will need to use a cross-platform library like QT. There are IDE's like QT Creator that will let you develop on one OS and generate Makefiles for others. For more information on cross platform development, check out the cross-platform episodes of this podcast (note that the series isn't over and new episodes appear to come out weekly).
As other answers explain you can probably compile for a Mac on Windows or Linux but you won't be able to test your applications so you should probably spend the $600 for a Mac if you’re doing professional programming, or if you’re working on open-source software find a developer with a Mac who will help you.
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I was recently tasked with performing a feasibility study based around switching from using DOS to Linux for use as an OS to run our industrial control software (developed internally). In a nutshell I have been restricted to using Ubuntu 8.04 (with a vendor supplied kernel upgrade providing drivers for the hardware on the board). As this is no longer supported I am unable to update or install software meaning that I am stuck using gcc version 4.2. I want to be able to use C++ and preferably boost libraries but currently this seems like I will not be able to do so.
Basically I am asking how do companies/professionals go about using Linux as a development environment? Is what I described above a common occurrence? Do you simply pick a version and a compiler and stick with it throughout the product lifetime to ensure that the development environment doesn't change too much or can you freely upgrade the kernel, compiler etc. as you go along? Is it common to be constrained by what a particular vendor can provide. Would anyone be prepared to give their opinion as to whether ubuntu 8.04 is a suitable choice of OS for development of industrial control software?
I am not a linux expert at all, but my research and experimentation so far is leading me to conclusion that I should abandon the linux approach and use DOS. Our company has no linux knowledge and is very small and for personal career reasons I have no interest in learning redundant technology like DOS.
I realise this is not exactly a yes/no type question but any responses will be gratefully received.
GCC 4.2 has no C++11 support but the C++03 support should be good and you should be able to find a version of Boost that can deal with that quite easily.
Ultimately, Linux has many upsides you won't find in DOS- for example, no segmentation, virtual memory, and such things that will make it easier and faster to develop software, not to mention additional libraries you might need, as absolutely nobody whatsoever will support DOS today.
With linux-based systems there's not much reason to stick with fixed OS+toolchain version, because backwards compatibility is a very serious issue in Unix-world. Sometimes it is good to target certain fixed system, but frankly these are rather rare, and even then the development can be done on up-to-date systems as long as testing is done on the target macine/platform.
Basically you could just upgrade to for example Ubuntu 12.04 LTS(long term support) for development and stick with it, it is very unlikely that there would be any sorts of uncompatibility problems on the target platform/machine.
Libraries and such tend to change between Linux distros, new versions of linux distros, and other *nix OSes.
I once worked on a C++ application that had to run on both Windows and RHEL. I was the 'Linux guy' on the team, so I got to deal with coaxing all the open-source linux libraries we were using to build and work on Windows (using cygwin), and getting the latest changes made by the devs working on Windows to work on Linux.
Midway through development, we upgraded to a newer version of RHEL. It was not a fun experience. Library versions had changed, some had been removed in favor of other 'equivalent' libs, etc. Shaking out all of the problems caused by changing gcc versions took a little while too (granted, the newer gcc version was a bit less forgiving and exposed some stuff in our code that probably wasn't quite right anyway).
A couple of days before a big demo, management informed us that the app needed to run on Solaris as well. That was not a trivial task -- Solaris is NOT Linux. They hinted about wanting it to run on IRIX at one point. Glad that didn't happen.
I would recommend that you pick a specific version of a Linux distro, gcc, etc. and stick with it throughout development. Upgrading that stuff can happen later, when the software is in maintenance. RHEL offers long-term support, at a cost. You might also consider the newly released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
I am a primary windows developer with experience in C#, .NET, Visual C/C++. I want to lean C/C++ development in linux in order to create portable GUI applications which run on both Windows and Linux.
I have used Fedora in past (2005). Want your suggestions to know which is the best distribution currently to learn programming in linux.
You can't really go wrong with any of the major ones. Personally I use Debian, but Fedora and OpenSUSE are good choices as well.
I would also like to point out that you can use C# to create portable GUI applications. Have a look at Mono and Gtk#. I have developed quite a few Gtk# apps and they usually run flawlessly on Windows and Linux, with very little work on my part. It might not be a bad introduction to coding on Linux, as you will be able to use a familiar language.
Any modern Linux distribution will do, as they all includes (or makes it easy to install) GCC. To easily create portable GUI applications, I would recommend taking a look at Qt.
Since every distro worth its salt has a Development Package that includes gcc, g++ and gdb, it's really going to come down to the IDE you develop your code in. Eclipse is an excellent IDE for C & C++ which just happens to be written in java. So long story short, use whatever distro you are comfortable with, it really doesn't matter all that much.
There is none Distribution you couldn't use. If you want an easy distribution working almost out of the box. With a lot of things configured automatically i would suggest you use ubuntu.
If you like to do more things on your own I'd tend to debian. Anyway you could simply code with qt and use the linux box for debugging only.
Slackware, ArchLinux or CentOS.
Stay away from Ubuntu and its derivatives, you will spend more time messing with packet manager apt-get than doing code. If you choose Debian-derivatives you will spend time wondering why your programs dont work only to find out you need packetname-devel also (!)
A base Slackware install should be enough to get you started, if you would like to keep having the latest programs, use ArchLinux.
You wrote "to create portable GUI applications which run on both Windows and Linux" - I suggest that you consider Qt (used to be from Trolltech now part of Nokia). http://qt.nokia.com/products/
I'm making a game that will allow content development and I'd like it to be sort of a DLL based system. But, my game works for Linux (X86 arch) , Mac OSX and 32 bit Windows. Is there a way I could allow content developers to compile only one thing and have it work based on the platform? I fear it might get confusing if there are 3 versions per plugin. What could I do?
Thanks
You can decide to use a cross-platform scripting environment like Lua for plugins. This is essentially what most cross-platform games do.
You could possibly use LLVM as a middle ground if you want C or C++ plugins. Have plugin devs ship LLVM assembly/bytecode, and use LLVM's runtime code emission to compile it to native code when you load it.
Unless things have changed drastically since I last looked at cross platform development if you are using c/c++ you need to compile and link for the operating system you are going to execute on.
So if you want to run on 3 operating systems you need 3 binaries.
weren't e.g. Xfree86 and/or Xorg drivers (video? or something else?)
"cross-OS" so they could be built once and "run" on any OS, at least on the same CPU....
no idea how that works ... a virtual machine of some kind perhaps???
probably overkill ...but certainly possible.....
is there any development environments that allow you to have one code base that can compile to Linux, Mac OS, and Windows versions without much tweaking? I know this is like asking for where the Holy Grail is burred, but maybe such a thing exists. Thanks.
This is achieved through a number of mechanisms, the most prominent being build systems and specific versions of code for certain systems. What you do is write your code such that, if it requires an operating system API, it calls a specific function. By example, I might use MyThreadFunction(). Now, when I build under Linux I get a linux specific version of this MyThreadFunction() that calls pthread_create() whereas the windows version calls CreateThread(). The appropriate includes are also included in these specific platform-files.
The other thing to do is to use libraries that provide consistent interfaces across platforms. wxWidgets is one such platform for writing desktop apps, as is Qt and GTK+ for that matter. Any libraries you use it is worth trying to find a cross-platform implementation. Someone will undoubtedly mention Boost at some point here. The other system I know if is the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) that provides a whole array of things to allow httpd to run on Windows/Linux/Mac.
This way, your core code-base is platform-agnostic - your build system includes the system specific bits and your code base links them together.
Now, can you do this from one desktop? I know you can compile for Windows from Linux and so probably for Mac OS X from Linux, but I doubt if you can do it from Windows-Linux. In any case, you need to test what you've built on each platform so my advice would be to run virtual machines (see vmware/virtualbox).
Finally, editors/environments: use whatever suits you. I use either Eclipse/GVim on Linux and Visual Studio on Windows - VS is my "Windows build system".
Maybe something like CodeBlocks?
Qt is a good library/API/framework for doing this in C++, and Qt Creator is a very pleasant IDE for it.
I've heard this is possible. Your compiler would need to support this. The only one that I know that does is GCC but it obviously requires a special configuration. I, however, have never used this feature. I've only seen that it exists.
What you are looking for is called "Cross Compiling"
I am trying to setup a development environment for Linux C++ application. Because I'm limited to my laptop (vista) which provides essential office applications, I want to program and access email, word at the same time.
I'd prefer a local Windows IDE. SSH to a company linux server and using VI doesn't seem productive to me. Even using some IDE installed on the linux server doesn't seem good to me, because I can't do the work at home.
So does Eclipse CDT + MinGW work for me, or is there any other choice?
Thanks.
ZXH
Why not install a Linux virtual machine on your laptop, in VMware or similar? That way you can test while you're developing too.
You can also try http://cygwin.com/
Is it a GUI app? And do you have to target Linux specifically? If not, Qt (http://trolltech.com/) may be something that you can use. It would allow you to more or less develop your whole application on Windows, and then spend a few hours on a linux machine getting the whole thing ported...
Qt is the best choice. I develop with tis tool for a long time. And you can develop with the same ide : QtCreator and the same framework : Qt on MacOS, Linux based or Windows plateform...
Moreover, specifically on Linux, Qt is well integrated with Kdevelop !
If you have Visual Studio, which I feel is an excellent IDE, you can try to set it up to use GCC/G++. I've done this before, back in the Visual Studio 6 days. As long as you aren't using any Windows-specific libraries and write portable C++, you can compile and test on Windows, then periodically ensure that the code also compiles properly for Linux.
Another approach, one that I actually prefer, is to host your source and make files on the Linux box, share the files through Samba, then use your Windows IDE/text editor to edit those files. Then, you can do the compiling through an SSH terminal. Sure, you'd lose the convenience of being able to compile through your IDE, but at least you wouldn't have to muck around getting the compiler set up on Windows.
If you have a linux server available to you, you could also use NX to log in graphically, and use a Linux IDE there like Code::Blocks, or shudder Eclipse. Of course, there's nothing unproductive about shelling in and using VIM. I find it's a good way to shake out the IDE-induced cobwebs every now and again. Happy coding however you end up doing so!
I use (and recommend) Netbeans for C/C++ Development together with Cygwin to develop POSIX applications on Windows that will run on Linux/Solaris later on.
It is pretty easy to setup as long as you stick to the stable version of Cygwin.
I was in a similar position 2-3 years ago and tried several approaches, but the only one that really worked wor me was vim+ssh (+gdb, make, svn, etc). But again, I use vim even for Windows development.
This slideshow (PDF) walks through how to set up a cross compiler from Windows to Linux.