Linker error building Adobe DNG SDK on MacOS 11

Question

I am working on a project that uses Adobe's DNG SDK 1.6 library, and it is supposed to work on Windows and MacOS.

The library has instructions on how to build it for both platforms, but I had to figure out an error that came up on Windows with Visual Studio. I am not very experienced with big C++ projects so it was not trivial but I got it working. Most of my own code will be done in C# .Net Core, calling the native libraries using a wrapper class with P/Invoke.

Now for Mac that's a different story, I have a MacOS 11 VM, installed Xcode 12.5.1 and followed the steps provided, as expected, it does not work. Bare in mind this is my first time touching Xcode and MacOS.

The project I am trying to build is dng_validate, and it depends on two libraries built by these projects: XMPFiles64 and XMPCore64.

The library projects build without any hiccups, each one of them creating a ".a" file in the folder: dng_sdk_1_6/xmp/toolkit/public/libraries/macintosh/intel_64_libcpp/Debug, they are named libXMPFilesStaticDebug.a and libXMPCoreStaticDebug.a respectively.

When I try to build the dng_validate project, I get the following error:

Library not found for -lXMPFilesStaticDebug

Because of the the error starting with an "l" instead of "lib", under both libraries project settings, I changed the "Executable Prefix" setting to "l" instead of "lib". Rebuilt both of them and made sure the file names changed as expected. But the error persists when trying to build the main project.

Under dng_validate's project settings, there is a setting called "Library Search Paths" and it does point to the proper aforementioned folder using a relative path. I even changed it to an absolute path to see if that would make it work.

I am really lost here, does anyone have an idea of what might be causing it?

Answer 1

Well... After asking on other forums and almost hiring a freelancer to fix this for me, I tried another shot in the dark of renaming the library files and it worked.

I changed the extensions of libXMPFilesStaticDebug.a and libXMPCoreStaticDebug.a from ".a" to ".dylib" and it just compiled and blew my mind with it.