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cocoapods-amimono

Move all dynamic frameworks symbols into the main executable.

Why would you want this plugin in your Podfile?

Apple introduced dynamic linking on iOS 8 alongside with Swift. Shortly after, this was adopted by CocoaPods as a requirement to use Pods that contain Swift, because Xcode can't use static libraries with Swift.

On iOS 9.1, a dyld crash affected the vast majority of apps that used a high number of dynamic frameworks. You can learn more about the issue on artsy/eigen#1246. Although the issue was fixed on iOS 9.3.2, it was clear that having a high number of dynamic frameworks was not a good idea. During WWDC 2016, someone asked what would be the optimal number of dynamic frameworks on an iOS application and we got the following response:

Apple advises to use about half a dozen dynamic frameworks in an app. Hard to achieve with external & internal deps. -- from Twitter

This is hardly an option for some. If you think you might be in that group, then continue reading.

What is this plugin doing?

This plugin is based on dyld-image-loading-performance. In a nutshell, it copies all symbols of your CocoaPods dependencies into your main app executable, so the dynamic linker doesn't have to load the frameworks. You can verify this yourself by enabling

and looking at the log output you shouldn't find any dlopen call of your CocoaPods frameworks.

Limitations

Currently this plugin has the following limitations:

• You will have modify your post_install hook. This is necessary because the CocoaPods plugin API currently doesn't offer everything that the gem needs.

Installation

gem install cocoapods-amimono

Usage

Add the following to your Podfile:

plugin 'cocoapods-amimono'

Add the following to your post_install hook:

post_install do |installer|
  require 'cocoapods-amimono/patcher'
  Amimono::Patcher.patch!(installer)
  ...

Example project

Here.