iOS App backed with cpp dyld crashes with error "missing symbol called"

Question

I got an iOS App with following nested structure:

iOS App (swift + objC) { 
 iOS Framework (objC + C++) {
    dynamic library (C++) {
      static library (C++)
    } 
  } 
}

It links and compiles successfully, but at runtime crashes with an error "dyld[58599]: missing symbol called". The crash is happening at the time when the code from the dynamic library is being called. The part of log which causes the crash:

*

Thread 3 name: Dispatch queue: sdf.export.queue Thread 3: 0 dyld
0x108049274 __terminate_with_payload + 8 1 dyld 0x10804e6ec abort_with_payload_wrapper_internal + 136 2 dyld 0x10804e700 abort_with_payload + 16 3 dyld 0x10801ea00 dyld4::halt(char const*) + 580 4 dyld 0x10802fd84 dyld4::APIs::_dyld_missing_symbol_abort() + 44

Please advise. I'm using Xcode 14.0 and iOS 15.6.1

Andrey, we cannot help with so little info. What's the missing symbol? Give you some hint: you can inpect your app in products directory. Get into the binary executable inside `Contents` -> `MacOS`, do dependency analysis with `otool -L ` to see if every dependency is within the app bundle. — kakaiikaka, Sep 23 '22 at 00:17

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 20 '22 at 05:50

Apparently, it was a bad idea trying to use dynamic library on iOS – the system can't find it and you can't place it and its dependencies at the place you want. The path of LC_ID_DYLIB always reflects the path on the Mac and not on the iOS device.

So the solution is to convert the dylib into a framework and then it can be embedded successfully. I also noticed it needs to be embedded on the App level and not on the internal framework (as described in the question) level.

iOS App backed with cpp dyld crashes with error "missing symbol called"

1 Answers1