darling VS osxcross

There is actually a Wine-like transplier called Darling. The problem is that development is very slow because there is not as much need for MacOS programs on Linux, and there is a huge shortage of volunteers and manpower. And it has been rendered almost obsolete because Apple moved to ARM. Additionally 90% of Apple's API is closed source despite Apple claiming to champion open source.

Unfortunately not. Darling [0] is still at the point that it can only run command line applications. Only the most basic GUI applications are supported. That's still a massive accomplishment that I don't want to diminish, but it's nowhere near the point that WINE was at even quite a long time ago.

[0] https://www.darlinghq.org/

xcodebuild CLI to compile iOS apps without a Mac. Seems possible in theory, although there's an ongoing issue some are seeing apparently: https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/issues/488

I wonder if there's opportunity for overlap with darling (https://www.darlinghq.org/) here, somewhat like using WINE on top of actual Windows.

Hi guys, just wanted to make a quick shoutout to Darling since not a lot people seem to know about it, which is a compatibility layer like Wine for Linux, but it allows for MacOS applications instead of Windows apps to be able to run on Linux!

If you actually have MacOS device and can install Xcode and so on then you can proceed here and read the instructions.

Have you considered using a dockerized osxcross cross compiler toolchain in your CI? Granted it is a bit clunky to setup...

Technically it's possible, but possibly not legal:

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

> Please ensure you have read and understood the Xcode license terms before continuing.

According to the EULA you may only use the SDK on Apple-branded computers. But you can use Linux to cross compile to Apple.

is there a way to cross compile without vms? something similar to https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross?

If you figure out how to get SDL working, one possibility is to develop on Linux, then use mingw-w64 to cross compile from Linux to windows, then use osxcross to cross-compile from Windows to OSX.

Thank you osxcross for creating the path forward

This is actually a solved problem, using osxcross[0]. The experience is honestly very smooth, and we don't require any apple proprietary binaries. The only thing apple-proprietary is their SDK (containing the header files for compiling, and tbd files for linking), which can be downloaded from apple's website (at least if you have a developer account), or from various GitHub projects archiving them.

[0]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross