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Comment by hippiehippo | Hacker News Reader

Is a Mac needed in order to compile?

You may be able to get it to work on other systems if you copy / port some of the necessary Apple bits. You'd have to copy the iOS SDKs from Xcode and get ld64 [0] / codesign [1] (both open source) to build on non-Mac machines. Perhaps some resource file prep tools as well. Then you could use libimobiledevice [2] and friends to push apps to the phone and debug them.

[0]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/ld64/ld64-136/ (unfortunately the last source release is from Xcode 4.6, 2 releases behind current)

[1]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/security_systemkeycha...

[2]: http://www.libimobiledevice.org/

is there a tutorial on this? The biggest hurdle to making iOS app is that you need a physical hardware from them.

Theos [0] has been used with Linux before but I have never personally done so. I don't think anybody has yet ported ld64/codesign to run natively on Linux but it has been possible for some time to run the Mac CLI dev tools under Linux using runtime shims like maloader [1] or its descendant Darling [2].

[0]: https://github.com/DHowett/theos

[1]: https://github.com/shinh/maloader

[2]: http://www.darlinghq.org/

is it possible to run this on windows 7?

maloader and Darling won't, they require Linux. LLVM works fine on Windows. I'm guessing the RoboVM front-end is also fairly portable. The effort to port ld64/codesign to Windows would probably be similar to the effort to port them to Linux.

Yes. It's stated in the "Get Started" section.

For now you'll need Xcode to use RoboVM which implies Mac OS X running on Mac hardware or in a VM (it can be done although Apple doesn't allow it unless you run the VM on Mac hardware).

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