CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosxcode
chetan
chetan

Reputation: 643

What is a .a (as libcrypto.a) file?

What exactly are .a (e.g. libcrypto.a) files and what do they consists of? Is it .m or .o or .h or .c files?

How does IOS SDK/Xcode understands them? And if we include the .a file in our xcode project, do we need to copy the correspondng sources file too?

Upvotes: 30

Views: 19304

Answers (1)

Mat
Mat

Reputation: 206709

.a files are static library files. They "contain" one or more .o files, i.e. compiled code. To use them, you (often) need the header (.h) files that correspond to the compiled code, but you do not need the source code (.c, .m) itself.

The .a files are produced with the ar utility, and the linker (ld) that is (usually) invoked by your compiler knows their format and how to extract the relevant pieces of code from the archive and into your executable.

Upvotes: 49

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