osxcross

I would look at osxcross[0] if you haven't looked into it already. It can at least do the "build stuff targeting macos" part (well, relatively speaking). Swift support kinda breaks down, unfortunately, and actually getting it set up is a bit of a hassle. but it does work. [0]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

One thing I'm super excited about here is that Zig can now cross-compile CGO to macOS [0], granted you link the appropriate macOS frameworks and SDK [1]. [0]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/20689, https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/21721 [1]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

Cross-compiling is likely a better approach: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross This is how Godot targets iOS: https://github.com/godotengine/build-containers/blob/main/Do... Here's a Docker image with the tools preinstalled, though you'll need some tweaks to target iOS: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/macos-cross-compiler While at RStudio (now called Posit), I worked on cross-compiling C/C++/Fortran/Rust on a Linux host targeting x86_64/aarch64 macOS. If you download an R package with native code from Posit Package Manager (https://p3m.dev/client/), it was cross-compiled using this approach :)

Even 600$ is quite a bit of money for a small open source project, especially outside of first world contries. You cannot except every single open source developer to buy somewhat overpriced hardware just to publish it in one platform. None of the other desktop/mobile platforms require specific hardware , Windows/Linux/Android can all be virtualized/cross compiled to. The only reason you cannot cross compile/virtualize from other platforms is because Apple doesn't want you to. Its possible, there are projects that allow you to do so, but it violates Apple's license. https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross Also its not fair to compare hobbies like photography or music to programming, you don't need any physical hardware other than a computer for majority of the cases, except testing (even that can be done somewhat reliably by virtualizati

Here you go: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

Thankfully osxcross[0] is already a thing and does already work fairly well. [0] https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

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. Do the Visual Studio build tools have more permissive license terms? AFAIK you can have clang-cl on Linux, but you do need a lot of the SDK for it to be useful. No experience there.

For macOS: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

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

For compiling, I'm pretty happy with https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross.

Cross-compiling is possible, but breaks the Xcode/Apple SDK license terms. https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#packaging-the-sdk https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/xcode.pdf

There is osxcross: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

> 1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine. I build for OSX from Linux using clang all the time. You just need to grab the sdk from xcode and get your toolchain all setup. https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

This toolchain can build C, C++ and Rust programs for macOS on Linux and FreeBSD. You'd need an Apple developer account to download the SDK. https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross/ It may not be a viable solution for every project, but it does work for many.