Build ICU for iOS

Question

I need ICU library for iPhone. I have tried to build it from souce, however, I am getting this erros:

   clang++   ...  /Users/petr/Development/icu-cross-compile-master/icu-60-2/source/tools/pkgdata/pkgdata.cpp
/Users/petr/Development/icu-cross-compile-master/icu-60-2/source/tools/pkgdata/pkgdata.cpp:544:18: error: call to unavailable function 'system': not available on iOS
    int result = system(cmd);
                 ^~~~~~
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS11.2.sdk/usr/include/stdlib.h:195:6: note: candidate function has been explicitly made unavailable
int      system(const char *) __DARWIN_ALIAS_C(system);

sh ${ICU_SOURCE}/configure --host=arm-apple-darwin --with-cross-build=${PREBUILD_DIR} ${PREFIX}

My PREFIX configuration is as:

--enable-extras=yes 
--enable-tools=yes 
--enable-icuio=yes 
--enable-strict=no 
--enable-static 
--enable-shared=no 
--enable-tests=yes 
--disable-renaming 
--enable-samples=no 
--enable-dyload=no
--with-data-packaging=static

Or is there any other way, how to generate libicudata.a? The similar build script works OK for Android, Mac and Win. Only iPhone is problem.

Do you really need to build tools? They are actually a bunch of command line tools. If you build ICU without tools it will build as well without need for patching. — ceztko, Feb 20 '20 at 22:06

Anton Malmygin · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-06T14:18:12.480

5

The problem is that system() is deprecated for iOS 11.

I think quick fix for you will be in using Xcode 6, instead of Xcode 9, so you can compile for iOS 7 as a target, where system() wasn't deprecated.

Or, if you really need iOS full compatible solution, you need to re-write ICU source code to use posix spawn functionality instead of system(). Check this answer for more details: How do you use posix_spawn to replace the deprecated 'system' to launch opendiff in Objective-C?

edited Jan 06 '18 at 14:18

answered Jan 06 '18 at 14:12

Anton Malmygin

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1

Thanks... replacing with posix_spawn helped. – Martin Perry Jan 06 '18 at 14:22
Hi @MartinPerry. Could you share some details on what you replaced? – Hons Jan 24 '18 at 11:25
1

@Hons See my github: https://github.com/MartinPerry/icu-build-scripts in build_icu_mac.sh from line 107 – Martin Perry Jan 25 '18 at 07:09
Perfect! Thanks! I have integrated that fix into my build scripts and it worked – Hons Jan 25 '18 at 12:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 20 '20 at 22:11

Another solution to successfully build ICU on iOS as a library is to build without tools with the configure flag --build-tools=no. The following is the complete set of configure flags I'm using to build for various platforms, android and ICU included.

    --enable-static=yes
    --enable-shared=no
    --enable-extras=no
    --enable-strict=no
    --enable-icuio=no
    --enable-layout=no
    --enable-layoutex=no
    --enable-tests=no
    --enable-samples=no
    --enable-tools=no
    --enable-dyload=no
    --with-data-packaging=archive

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 29 '21 at 14:11

I've just made a makefile which will download the ICU source and create a universal framework for Mac, Catalyst, iOS Simulator and iOS. This can then just be drag-and-dropped into your project.

https://github.com/dbquarrel/icu4c-xcframework

Might help you (though many years late).

My use was to enable the icu tokenizer in sqlite for iOS.

Build ICU for iOS

3 Answers3