Plans for the future

[ForestRingGames]

Hello sterin!

We've discovered this today and we're really excited that you work on this and that there's hope for VS code replacing Xcode (at least for parts of the workflow). We are developing a game in C++ in Xcode for iOS (and Android). Is there any hope that you will be able to support iOS-builds in the future?
Is it possible to get debugging for iOS-Apps inside VS Code to work?

We're fully aware that this is a new project, but we're just interested in the roadmap and the things that might come ;)

Cheers,
Max

[sterin]

Hi Max,

To be honest, there is no real roadmap. I just wrote a the minimal extension that works for me, hoping that other people might find it useful. I'd be happy to hear any suggestions/feedback/criticism/requests or accept pull requests.

Unfortunately, I don't develop for iOS, so I am not familiar with the flow. I think that it would be easy to adapt the parts of the flow that are driven by command line tools: compile, package, sign, launch, profile, etc.

Debugging is another matter entirely. My extension doesn't do much. It just launches the Microsoft C++ extension for debugging - I don't know whether it supports debugging on iOS. I am somewhat optimistic because the following link indicates that lldb can be used to debug iOS apps: http://codedigging.com/blog/2016-04-27-debugging-ios-binaries-with-lldb/ . The people at https://gitter.im/Microsoft/vscode might be able to answer that.

Baruch

[ForestRingGames]

Hi Baruch,

I've now tried it out extensively and it's indeed possible to build the iOS project with your extension. Unfortunately it doesn't work to run it. I guess there's a setting missing that defines on which device to run (Simulator iPhone or iPad, which real device). If that would work it'd be pretty perfect.

Could you try to create a basic iOS project and see if you can build/run it for simulator?

I'd be more than happy to do it myself, but I have no experience with VS Code extensions and I guess you're probably know much better where to add that. It would be really cool if you could have a look :)

Yes, iOS uses lldb, so there's hope that debugging would work!

Cheers,
Max

[sterin]

Hi Max,

I am currently busy, but in the near future, I'dd ad the following:

(1) Some options to choose the SDK, addint -sdk to the xcodebuild command line. It will allow you to build for device or simulator.

(2) A basic option to run an iOS app on the simulator. I played with ios-sim which simplifies running the simulator. For example, the following command runs the app on an iPhone-7 simulator image with iOS 10.3.

ios-sim launch test.app/ --devicetypeid "com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-7, 10.3"

Baruch

[sterin]

With a bit of a delay: I've added -sdk option and the README has an example on how to run with ios-sim.

[LinusU]

Would be awesome if we could integrate this with ios-deploy as well, to run on an actual device.