Xcode Treasures

Understanding App Bundles

To understand how apps work, it helps to take a step back and think of how you even go from all the files in your project to a running app. For apps on Apple’s platforms, executable code and resources are handled very differently, and are brought together in a very clever way.

Compiling Code

In fact, step all the way back to 1978: the era of disco, Cold War tensions, and most importantly, the first edition of The C Programming Language [KR98]. Many developers started their careers with this book, which begins with the iconic “Hello, World” program, which looks almost exactly like this:

building/HelloWorldC/HelloWorldC.c

#import <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
        printf("hello, world\n");
}

This is identical ...