Setting Up XCode 11.7 for CS106b on macOS 1.15 Catalina

Approach

The assignment bundles don't work on newer versions of XCode/macOS because they depend on the bundled static "Stanford Portable Library for C++" helper library that seems to be compiled for older achitectures; and they include outdated XCode project files.

We will re-compile the Stanford helper libraries ourselves, and drop them in as replacements for the old ones.

Build the Stanford Helper Library

Some of the library depends on Java, so install a recent JDK and make sure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set, e.g. by following this. Download and unzip the source code cpplib.zip from here

Fix a couple of issues with the source

You may find you don't need to do these steps, depending on your system, but it doesn't hurt to do them anyway:

• Navigate into cpplib
• Edit src/tests/unittest.cpp, replacing instances of sin with str_in. This prevents a name clash with an existing math library.
• Edit src/simpio.cpp, replacing instances of istringstream(line) with istringstream(line + " "). See here for details.

Make the Library

Open Terminal

cd ~/Downloads/cpplib
make

This will put the statically compiled library in the lib/ folder.

Rearrange the files

The easiest way to make use of the newly-compiled Stanford helper library is to make a copy of it and rearrange it intothe equivalent file structure of the StanfordCPPLib directory that comes bundled with the assignments. Then it is simply a case of replacing the bundled StanfordCPPLib directory with the new one. This way, there's no need to re-point XCode to the libraries, as the project file is already set up to look for the StanfordCPPLib directory.

From having just run make:

cd ..
cp -R cpplib StanfordCPPLib
cd StanfordCPPLib
mv include/* .
mv lib/libStanfordCPPLib.a .
mv java/spl.jar .

Download an Assignment

Use the download page here. This is the 2013 site, which seems more up to date than the original 2008 course materials (so assumed more likely to work with macOS10) but is not the "QT Ctreator" version which the course seems to have moved to for the most recent iterations. The assumption is the QT Creator content won't match up as well with the 2008 course material, but this may not be true.

Download and unzip Assignment 1, this is the "10.6 and 10.8 Files" version, but it should not matter as we're not depending on any precompiled libraries, or the XCode project file.

Start XCode 11.7 On the Welcome screen choose "Open another project..." Open Assignment1-xcode/1 - Consecutive Heads/Consecutive Heads.xcodeproj Hit the Play button to Build and Run, you should get this error: The linked library 'libStanfordCPPLib.a' is missing one or more architectures required by this target: x86_64.. I think the .a file is compiled for a 32-bit Intel architecture.

Link the Stanford Library

Copy your newly-compiled Stanford library StanfordCPPLib to the same folder where all your Assignment directories will live. Then, for each assignment (e.g. Assignment1-xcode) delete the old libraries and replace them with links to the newly compiled libraries:

cd Assignment1-xcode/1 - Consecutive Heads/
rm -r StanfordCPPLib
rm -r spl.jar
ln -s ../../StanfordCPPLib
ln -s ../../StanfordCPPLib/spl.jar

Another approach - from Scratch

Create an XCode Command Line C++ project from scratch. Add the <newlib>/include/ directory to the Header Search Paths Add the <newlib>/lib/ directory to the Library Search Paths In Build Phases, Link Binary with Libraries, and add the new libStanfordCPPLib.a here. Alternatively, add the .a file under Other Linker Flags by adding a -lStanfordCPPLib (the syntax is -l without a space).