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wxWidgets can be compiled using Apple's Cocoa toolkit.
Most OS X developers should start by downloading and installing Xcode from the App Store. It is a free IDE from Apple that provides all of the tools you need for working with wxWidgets.
After Xcode is installed, download wxWidgets-{version}.tar.bz2 and then
double-click on it to unpack it to create a wxWidgets directory.
Next use Terminal (under Applications, Utilities, Terminal) to access a command
prompt. Use cd to change directories to your wxWidgets directory and execute
the following sets of commands from the wxWidgets directory.
mkdir build-cocoa-debug
cd build-cocoa-debug
../configure --enable-debug
make
It is recommended to use -jN option with the last command, where N is a
number of the processors in your system (which can be checked using sysctl -n hw.ncpu command if you are not sure), as this will dramatically speed up the
build on modern systems. So in practice you should use a command like this:
make -j8
(but don't use it unless you actually have 8 CPUs and enough memory for that many parallel compiler invocations).
You may also prefer to add -s option to avoid normal output from make and/or
redirect it you to a log file for further inspection.
You should build at least the smallest possible wxWidgets sample to verify that everything is working as intended, by doing
cd samples/minimal
make
and then running minimal.app from this directory from Finder.
If you'd like to, you can also build all the other samples and demos
cd samples; make;cd ..
cd demos; make;cd ..
When building library for the distribution with your application, you shouldn't
use --enable-debug option above but you may want to use --disable-sys-libs
option to ensure that it has no dependencies on the other libraries available
on the current system as they might not be present on all systems where the
application is used.
It is also often desirable to build the final version of the application as
"universal binary", i.e. a combination of binaries for several different
architectures. In this case, you should build wxWidgets as universal binary
too, using --enable-universal_binary option. By default, this option enables
building for the usually wanted set of architectures (currently ARM and Intel)
but you may override this by listing the architectures you want to use
explicitly, separating them with commas.
It is rarely desirable to install non-Apple software into system directories,
so the recommended way of using wxWidgets under macOS is to skip the make install step and simply use the full path to wx-config under the build
directory when building application using the library.
If you want to install the library into the system directories you'll need to do this as root. The accepted way of running commands as root is to use the built-in sudo mechanism. First of all, you must be using an account marked as a "Computer Administrator". Then
sudo make install
type \<YOUR OWN PASSWORD\>
If you build wxWidgets as static libraries, i.e. pass --disable-shared option
to configure, you don't need to do anything special to distribute them, as all
the required code is linked into your application itself. When using shared
libraries (which is the default), you need to copy the libraries into your
application bundle and change their paths using install_name_tool so that
they are loaded from their new locations.
You can use the project in build/osx/wxcocoa.xcodeproj to build the Cocoa version of wxWidgets (wxOSX/Cocoa). There are also sample projects supplied with the minimal sample.
Notice that the command line build above builds not just the library itself but also wxrc tool which doesn't have its own Xcode project. If you need this tool, the simplest possibility is to build it from the command line after installing the libraries using commands like this:
$ cd utils/wxrc
$ g++ -o wxrc wxrc.cpp `wx-config --cxxflags --libs base,xml`