Frameworks too ?

[ThrudTheBarbarian]

More of a question than an issue. Is it possible to deal with frameworks ? Or is that a step too far. I’m assuming that with Windows wanting DLLs in the same directory as the executable, it might be a bit difficult…

Just wondering how i should structure my Mac app so it has the best chance of easily being transported over.

[triplef]

Good question, I think you’re right that a macOS-style framework layout probably won’t work (at least out of the box) because the DLLs won’t be found. I never tried though, if you do please let us know. Also, @rfm do you maybe have any knowledge of what should or won’t work in terms of frameworks on Windows?

You should be able to put the framework DLL next to your .exe though. One thing that I think won’t work is [NSBundle bundleForClass:] in a class that is defined in the framework, although maybe it will look in the Resources/<framework-name> folder (if not that’s probably something that could be fixed).

In our app we just replaced -bundleForClass: with something like [[NSBundle bundleWithPath:[NSBundle.mainBundle pathForResource:@"<framework>" ofType:@"bundle"]] and put an extra framework bundle in Resources/<exe-name>/<framework>.bundle.

In our case we also let CMake build all our (internal) frameworks into the executable (using CMake object libraries for the frameworks), so there’s no extra DLLs to be loaded.

Hope that helps!