Hi, I need to integrate either a .NET dll or a CPP library. in an XCode project that targets macOS and iOS. I don't have access to the library's source code. I'm wondering what would be easier (if it's even possible)?
Another option would be to be a cli app that communicates with the macOS/iOS app, but again should I use .Net or cpp?
thanks in advance
This is probably best answered elsewhere since it doesn't have anything to do with open-source Swift.
Given that, Windows .dll files are not useable on Apple systems, they have no meaning other that as a binary blob. Similarly, if the CPP library is a Windows .lib file, it also won't work on Apple systems, it's just a binary blob that the Apple linkers do not understand. If the code has been compiled for Apple systems (.NET dll is actually a dylib, the CPP library is an object file archive, .a file), then all you have to do is add then as libraries to be linked for the Xcode target you want.
You’ll need to write shims in plain C to work with either of these libraries. It’ll likely be easier to do that on top of the C++ library, although I believe .Net includes marshalling functionality to interoperate with C so theoretically there should be a way to use that too.
To do this, you’ll need to set up a C language target in your Swift package. The official documentation could use some improvement here, but if you Google for “SwiftPM C target”, you should find some relatively-recent tutorials. Essentially it involves declaring the target and putting the public headers where SwiftPM can find them.
Using a binary library isn’t a problem; you just need to tell the linker where to find it. There are 2 ways to do that:
Apologies that I can’t tell you exactly what you need to do to make this work, but hopefully this helps guide you to finding a solution.