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holy shit i just built a legacy 32-bit iOS app from source using a legally clean, fully open-source, multi-platform iOS SDK and it actually managed to run on my jailbroken 32-bit iOS device (a 3rd-gen iPod touch)
this is a huge win for touchHLE development i'm so happy
please don't signal-boost this okay, it's not ready for prime time, though it is all public if you know where to look
this is also, by the way, entirely the result of the hard work of other touchHLE contributors, not us, for once! we merely dared to try the SDK on a real device
this is going to be so much less painful than running obsolete versions of Xcode on an incredibly obsolete version of OS X in an insufferably slow virtual machine stored on spinning rust, all on a passively-cooled laptop that, bless its heart, only has two cores, and it's Intel
damn you can't do dlsym(dlopen(0, 0), "objc_msgSend") in a binary that hasn't linked libobjc, even with the dyld shared cache. i was really hoping that would work it'd be so funny. apple please make the dyld shared cache work like that. ignore the security folks they hate fun
dlsym(dlopen("/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib", 0), "objc_msgSend") works though! yay.wav
what the fuck, modern macOS (Monterey, but allegedly also macOS 26) still has the ability to sync IPA files to iOS devices, sneakily hidden? if you open an iOS device in the Finder and drop an IPA file onto the “General” page, it actually installs?! i can't fucking believe this
it has been more than 8 years since iTunes last allowed you to sync apps (in .ipa form) to iOS devices, and in the meantime iTunes has been slaughtered, the organs harvested from its quaking corpse and reanimated as unworthy “Music” and “Devices” apps, so this is astonishing
touchHLE 32-bit iOS toolchain demo video!!! exciting UIKit app!!! me rambling at the camera about dynamic linking!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OJO7WXa5LU
and now, after many hours of effort to reorganise touchHLE's internals and properly fix the toolchain…
we can finally write completely ordinary objective-c code :)
![Photo of a MacBook (2017), an iPod touch (3rd gen), and a chibi Kanbaru Suruga figurine (she's posing smugly for the viewer). On the iPod touch, we see an app that displays a white screen, the default iOS status bar, and the text “hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)” in the centre. On the MacBook, we see the same app running in touchHLE (with no status bar, and the emoji replaced by tofu). We also see a window showing part of the source code for the app; a window showing some directories like “TestApp_source”, “Payload”, and “stubs/Frameworks”; and a window showing the iPod touch is connected over USB and runs iOS 5.1.1.
The source code looks like ordinary 2009-era iOS Objective-C, except it is declaring all the classes and functions it uses, rather than including header files. Part of the source code reads:
UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:[window bounds]];
label.text = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:"hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)"];](https://social.noyu.me/fileserver/01K5XEEZF4A486Z2PRS7NHG169/attachment/small/01K6TGKNZ5S1YX33E0NAX0Y94M.jpg "Photo of a MacBook (2017), an iPod touch (3rd gen), and a chibi Kanbaru Suruga figurine (she's posing smugly for the viewer). On the iPod touch, we see an app that displays a white screen, the default iOS status bar, and the text “hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)” in the centre. On the MacBook, we see the same app running in touchHLE (with no status bar, and the emoji replaced by tofu). We also see a window showing part of the source code for the app; a window showing some directories like “TestApp_source”, “Payload”, and “stubs/Frameworks”; and a window showing the iPod touch is connected over USB and runs iOS 5.1.1.
The source code looks like ordinary 2009-era iOS Objective-C, except it is declaring all the classes and functions it uses, rather than including header files. Part of the source code reads:
UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:[window bounds]];
label.text = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:\"hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)\"];")
![Photo of a MacBook (2017), an iPod touch (3rd gen), and a chibi Kanbaru Suruga figurine (she's posing smugly for the viewer). On the iPod touch, we see an app that displays a white screen, the default iOS status bar, and the text “hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)” in the centre. On the MacBook, we see the same app running in touchHLE (with no status bar, and the emoji replaced by tofu). We also see a window showing part of the source code for the app; a window showing some directories like “TestApp_source”, “Payload”, and “stubs/Frameworks”; and a window showing the iPod touch is connected over USB and runs iOS 5.1.1.
The source code looks like ordinary 2009-era iOS Objective-C, except it is declaring all the classes and functions it uses, rather than including header files. Part of the source code reads:
UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:[window bounds]];
label.text = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:"hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)"];](https://social.noyu.me/fileserver/01K5XEEZF4A486Z2PRS7NHG169/attachment/original/01K6TGKNZ5S1YX33E0NAX0Y94M.jpg "Photo of a MacBook (2017), an iPod touch (3rd gen), and a chibi Kanbaru Suruga figurine (she's posing smugly for the viewer). On the iPod touch, we see an app that displays a white screen, the default iOS status bar, and the text “hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)” in the centre. On the MacBook, we see the same app running in touchHLE (with no status bar, and the emoji replaced by tofu). We also see a window showing part of the source code for the app; a window showing some directories like “TestApp_source”, “Payload”, and “stubs/Frameworks”; and a window showing the iPod touch is connected over USB and runs iOS 5.1.1.
The source code looks like ordinary 2009-era iOS Objective-C, except it is declaring all the classes and functions it uses, rather than including header files. Part of the source code reads:
UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:[window bounds]];
label.text = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:\"hello, real iOS! 🌏 (look mom, no Xcode!)\"];")
@hikari @aramya Wow this is neat! I used to build Tor for iOS using the open source iphonedevonlinux toolchain but support stopped at iOS version 3.0 https://code.google.com/archive/p/iphonedevonlinux/wikis/Installation.wiki (and https://sid77.slackware.it/ios/ for context).
What’s the support status of this new toolchain? And do you also have any links to share around? 😄
@sid77 @aramya https://github.com/touchHLE/common-3.0-sdk
This SDK only really exists to serve touchHLE's particular needs, so while it can build C, Objective-C and C++ code, it doesn't for example provide headers for the vast majority of the Apple APIs (you have to provide them yourself), and you can only link against APIs that touchHLE actually implements.
https://theos.dev/ might be more practical but we have not tried it and cannot vouch for it.