About

RubyMotion BridgeSupport is a Ruby C Extension that is used to generate xml metadata for C and Objective C header files. The metadata is used for AOT compilation of Foreign Function Interfaces used within RubyMotion. Variants of this C Extension are also used by Apple's Interface Builder (located at /System/Library/BridgeSupport/ on MacOS), PyObjC, and FUSE.

This is a hard fork of Apple's Version with the following enhancements:

• gen_bridge_metadata takes in a --headers switch which is a collection of header files. This allows the generation of xml metadata for very large codebases without approaching the limits on number of characters that can be sent to the CLI.
• The clang target for the C Extension is in lock step with the clang version that Apple ships with Xcode (they are usually a version or two behind LLVM.org).
• This version also supports the generation of xml metadata for Java and JNI (which currently isn't in the repository, but will be extracted from RubyMotion and placed here, eventually).
• Contains compilation updates to fix Segfault issues on Mojave when compiled against system Ruby.

How to Build

• Assumses you are on MacOS 13.4.1
• Install Xcode 14.3.1
• Install brew and run the following commands:

brew install gcc
brew install make
brew install cmake

• Install Xcode 10.3, it is strongly recommended that you do not install Xcode from the App Store and instead use the archived images provided in Apple's Developer Portal Download Archive.
• Install Xcode at /Applications/Xcode.app (if you have another version of Xcode installed there, you can just rename it temporarily).
• After installing Xcode, you must double click Xcode and open it at least once to accept EULAs.
• Open Terminal and run:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
sudo xcode-select --install
sudo xcode-select --reset

NOTE: The version that is used within the repo must be system Ruby. Do not change the .ruby-version file.

• Download the Starter License for RubyMotion (if you want to test an update).

• Clone this repo and cd into the directory and run:

ruby --version # should be: ruby 2.6.10p210 (2022-04-12 revision 67958) [universal.arm64e-darwin22]
sudo gem install xml-simple
sudo gem install rake
sudo gem install minitest
sudo gem install nokogiri -v 1.13.10

NOTE: the sudo is required for the commands above because we are using system ruby.

• Run:

make clean
make
make install DESTDIR=./RubyMotion/lib/BridgeSupport3

NOTE: compilation will take a while (30 min+).

• Once compiled and installed, run the following command to perform a precursory test:

cd test
sh ./sample.sh
cat ./sample.bridgesupport

If the command above runs without errors, your environment is set up correctly.

• You can run the test suite using the following command:

cd test
rake test

• Optionally you can run sudo make install DESTDIR=/Library/RubyMotion/lib/BridgeSupport3 if you want to test any patches against your own RubyMotion projects.

• All the source code for BridgeSupport is located under the ./swig directory. You can change the source code there and then run the following to build, install, and test your changes:

make rebuild
make install DESTDIR=./RubyMotion/lib/BridgeSupport3
cd test
rake test