How To: Cross compiling libraries for iOS (armv6/armv7/i386)

Update

• If you wanna compile and use Tesseract  3.01 on Xcode 4.2 with iOS SDK 5, check my new post “How To: Compile and Use Tesseract (3.01) on iOS (SDK 5)”.

So, if you’re a smart programmer, when you get asked to solve some new problem (“new” in the “I’ve never done this before” sense) you head over to Chrome (not Opera/Firefox, as I stated earlier, you’re SMART, not FASHION or OUTDATED), hit “CTRL + L” and start typing some keywords related to your problem, hit ENTER and wait for the amazing amount of resources Google (not Bing, because, as I stated earlier, you’re a programmer, not a no-brains) will hand you.

Among those resources, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll find out an OpenSource library that claims to solve exactly, or at least a piece of, your problem. This Library has binary downloadable packages for almost every OS you can imagine and even for OpenSolaris BUT, if you’re a mobile App developer (Android/iOS), they won’t give a fck!ng d@mn $h!t binary for your target OS.

Well, at this point, if you’re in a good day and helped that old lady cross the street a couple of hours earlier, this Library will be ready to compile through one configure script named, ehrm… “configure”.

If you’ve made it through here, maybe I can save your day. I’ve prepared one Bash script that is able to cross-compile one (or more) Static Library in different architectures (armv6/armv7/i386) and pack all different lib*.a into one single FAT FILE (or Universal Binary) so you can link against the same file when compiling for iPhone3G/3GS/4/Simulator.