1/28/2024 0 Comments Xcode projectTo solve most of these problems, some engineers in the iOS community came up with the idea of automatically generating the project files. As an example of one possible issue, if multiple engineers are working in parallel and trigger changes on the same project file, there is a high chance that this will result in painful git conflicts. Maintaining project files has always been a problem for iOS developers, especially as the number of contributors working on the same codebase grows. To give you a better understanding of this, in December 2019, we had more than 80,000 lines of code representing our project. Now let’s try to imagine how large this file would be in a project of the size of the SoundCloud iOS app, which is composed of thousands of source files and split across dozens of frameworks with multiple targets, hundreds of build settings, and complex linking rules. Project Files Are for Computers, Not for Humans Furthermore, a single file addition creates changes in different sections of the project file, which needs to respect a specific format and particular conventions, or else it would result in an invalid project that can’t be opened. The first thing you may notice is that the generated code is not easy to read or change, as it uses unique random identifiers to refer to every entry of the project. Every time you make a change to an Xcode project, such as adding a new source file or changing a setting, the IDE generates some code into a file called project.pbxproj.įor example, here is an extract of changes that are automatically generated by Xcode when creating a new file: Xcode is the official tool for developing apps on Apple platforms. In this blog post, we will discuss the problems of maintaining a complex iOS project, how we managed to simplify the process by writing less and more consistent code, and how we ended up with lower build times as an unexpected result. There is the same order of magnitude between the ratio of these two planets and the amount of code that defined the SoundCloud iOS project before - Jupiter - and after - Earth - generating it using Tuist. Here's an example: CDAC634017A0EF4C00F5452A /* KZPropertyMapper.Planet Earth vs. All stored again in a dictionary fashion, with hexadecimal identifiers. Everything about the project is in there. RootObject = CDAC62FA17A0EF1A00F5452A /* Project object */ The top level is something like // !$*UTF8*$! It appears as a sort of JSON, written in C, as it as a hierarchy, with inside =, and /* inline comments */. I've used the project.pbxproj from KZPropertyMapper a smart and timesaving library that you should all checkout. A project defines default build settings for all the targets in the project (each target can also specify its own build settings, which override the project build settings).Ĭool, I got that, but what about the file itself? Let's open one with a text editor. It contains one or more targets, which specify how to build products. A project contains all the elements used to build your products and maintains the relationships between those elements. pbxproj.Īn Xcode project is a repository for all the files, resources, and information required to build one or more software products. It might be interesting to explore the rest of the content, but for now let's just focus on the. Project.pbxproj is contained into YourProjectName.xcodeproj, which is nothing more than a folder. Where to start if not from the merge nightmare, the project.pbxproj. I use Xcode every day (what an happy life), and it has now come the time to dig deeper into this pain in the butt of an IDE. It should have arrived earlier but this month has been strange, because of several reasons I didn't had and didn't make enough time to write. Note: this is post is the first answer to my October's Questions.
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