Building for OSX,iOS,tvOS & watchOS on Windows

Note: This is a work-in-progress and still being tested for possible distribution issues. I will update this blog post as the work progresses. 

Trying to simplify my life a bit over here, I am on a journey to eliminate my Mac from the build iteration cycle. The goal is to completely ship all binaries for both Bink and Oodle Lossless Image (OLI) directly from my PC rather than occasionally building on a mac only to find that Apple broke yet another thing in the latest OSX update or iSDK release (seriously, stop that!). 

First thing first, your gonna need a toolchain. I used the toolchain from http://www.pmbaty.com/iosbuildenv/ which is claimed to be a native port of the apple tools opensource.apple.com/tarballs/.   

I also used MSys (via http://mingw.org/) over here so I could have my same build scripts that work on OSX work nearly transparently on Win as well with very little modification.
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To build for OSX, iOS, tvOS and watchOS you are going to need some sysroots from a real mac. 

You can find these and some frameworks you are going to need in each SDK release at the following paths

• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/AppleTVOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/AppleTVOS{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/AppleTVSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/AppleTVSimulator{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/WatchOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/WatchOS{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/WatchSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/WatchSimulator{version}.sdk
• /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX{version}.sdk

Next use clang to build for Apple by specifying some additional parameters.

The first of which is your target specification.

• When building for iOS use "--target=arm-apple-ios10"
• When building for tvOS use "--target=arm-apple-tvos10"
• When building for watchOS use "--target=arm-apple-watchos10"
• When building for iPhoneSimulator use "--target=x86_64-apple-ios10"  
• When building for AppleTVSimulator use "--target=x86_64-apple-tvos10"  
• When building for WatchSimulator use "--target=x86_64-apple-watchos10"  
• When building for 32-bit OSX use "--target=x86-apple-darwin-macho"
• When building for 64-bit OSX use "--target=x86_64-apple-darwin-macho"

Second, specify your framework directory. This is located in your {SDK}/System/Library/Frameworks directory, so would be specified as "-F{SDK}/System/Library/Frameworks"

Third, you need to specify your sysroot as "--sysroot {SDK}". The sysroot tells the compiler where your headers and libs are. 

That's about it for building stuff (I think?). Just use as normal.

To make a DMG file you need to do things a bit differently since there is no hdiutil on windows as it is closed-source apple tech. 

Instead of hdiutil, you use mkisofs (you can get that with mingw, or provided also right here...

mkisofs.exe
File Size:	344 kb
File Type:	exe

Download File

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invocation would look something like

mkisofs -J -R -o {file}.dmg -mac-name -V "{title}" -apple -v -dir-mode 777 -file-mode 777 {dmg_directory}

As for signing executables, I haven't yet had to worry about that... hoping I won't! I would point you to the pmbaty ios tools which has an executable signer in there. 

If I missed anything, or something is not clear or not working for you, please let me know in the comments below and I'll help if I can!