Generating stubs

Darling has a stub generator that is capable of generating stubs for C and Objective-C frameworks and shared libraries. A computer running macOS is required to run the stub generator.

Preparations

You don't need to do this step if you already have a bin folder in your home directory, with the PATH variable pointing to it. If not, copy/paste the following commands into Terminal.

Create the bin folder if it doesn't exist:

mkdir ~/bin

If your PATH variable does not include the bin folder, you will need to add it.

# For bash
echo "export PATH=\"~/bin:\$PATH\"" >> ~/.bash_profile && source ~/.bash_profile
# For zsh
echo "export PATH=\"\$HOME/bin:\$PATH\"" >> ~/.zshenv && source ~/.zshenv

Getting the stub generator

Copy/paste the following command into Terminal. It will download both darling-stub-gen and class-dump and place it in the bin folder

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/darlinghq/darling/master/tools/darling-stub-gen -o ~/bin/darling-stub-gen && chmod +x ~/bin/darling-stub-gen && curl https://github.com/darlinghq/class-dump/releases/download/mojave/class-dump -L -o ~/bin/class-dump && chmod +x ~/bin/class-dump

Using the stub generator

To run the stub generator, structure your arguments like this:

darling-stub-gen /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/DVDPlayback DVDPlayback

The process is identical for dynamic libraries.

The above command will create a folder that can be placed in the either the src/frameworks/ or src/private-frameworks/ directory of Darling's source tree. Note that the first argument points to the actual binary of the framework, not the root directory of the framework.

Applying the stubs to Darling

Once you have generated the stub folder for the framework, copy that folder into Darling's source tree. If the framework is public, put it in src/frameworks/. If the framework is private put it in src/private-frameworks/.

After you add in the folder, you will need to include it in the build. In src/frameworks/CMakeLists.txt (or src/private-frameworks/CMakeLists.txt if the framework is private), add the following line: add_subdirectory(MyNewFolder). Make sure you put it in alphabetical order.

To generate the SDK headers, make sure that you set REGENERATE_SDK to ON when you run the cmake command (ex: cmake .. -DREGENERATE_SDK=ON).

Run a build and make sure your new code compiles. After that completes, you are ready to submit a pull request.

See Contributing for how to submit a pull request. This pull request is an example of a stub for a framework that was added to Darling using the process described in this article. Most notable is what it does to src/CMakeLists.txt.

Known issues

The stub generator does not currently generate symbols for constants. Those must be manually added if a program needs them.
Generating stubs for platforms outside of x86 (macOS, iOS Simulator) is not supported.
TODO: Figure out how to generate stubs from a dyld_shared_cache file.

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