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I'd like to do more macOS size coding, and have an idea for this one weird trick... only I need to know if one particular command is available on a machine with no dev tools installed, and I don't have one of those. Can anyone help? If so...

What I'd like you to do is this:

1. Open Terminal (you can find it under Applications/Utilities)

2. Type "xcrun" and press enter. If it says "command not found", proceed.
If it says a bunch of other stuff, you have the developer tools installed, and you can't help, but thanks for trying :)

3. Type "swift" and press enter. It'll either say "command not found" or "Welcome to Apple Swift blah blah". Please let me know either way!

4. If it does fire up swift, type "import AppKit" and hit enter. Let me know if it shows an error (if not it will just show a new line).

5. type ":q" and press enter to quit ;)

can't help yah, all my macs have xcode et al on it already :/

I have 4 macs, 3 have Xcode, the other had some stuff installed with brew. Which installs Xcode command line tools... It's so hard to find an install with no dev tools!

Sorry, xcode here as well :/

OSX Homebrew is very useful for coding stuff, make sure you have that installed. Also ensure that you have Python 2.7 installed as well. That way, you can install and run the Mac version of Bonzomatic :)

Sure, but maybe check if the swift command is installed for me first? :)

You could use virtual machines like with VMware, VirtualBox, etc.

I spent a few hours trying to get the latest macOS running in virtualbox, without success... have given up on that.

TBH the best thing to do if you're looking to work in MacOS is to buy a Macbook Pro. Avoid the 2011 models as these have a lot of faults on them, but if you go for a 2012 model then that should be decent enough. Quad core rather than dual if you can do this. VirtualBox may not quite have everything you need to run MacOS properly TBH ...

I have High Sierra installed in VirtualBox, no devtools or any such things installed to my knowledge (unless it's shipped with the OS?). Don't know if this info is useful to you but here it is anyway:


Both invocations opened an UI popup that prompted to install Xcode.

Since a few of you seem to be missing the point...

psonice is a mac coder, who has multiple macs, and might have found a new sizecoding trick.
He's trying to work out if this trick works on a brand new install of the OS (like a compomachine would be) - the trick depends on a particular command and we're not sure whether it's part of the vanilla OS or whether it comes with xcode.

(alright for the record, noby's message was sent after I started typing)

My install is kinda pretty as vanilla as you can get I suppose (haven't done much with it), but it's also a modified image to make it run on AMD Ryzen CPUs but that technically shouldn't affect the situation.

@noby Thanks, that's useful. Would still be good to confirm on 10.14.4 (the latest version) though if anyone has a fairly standard install, because swift runtimes at least ship with that. It's not looking too hopeful tho :/

Does "xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools." qualify as "bunch of other stuff"? :)

Apparently that's what it says instead of "file not found" :) What does it say if you type 'swift'?

the same again:

xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools.

10.14.4 btw

Arse. That's such a pity. With that one command, my basic "runs a trivial shader, no audio" exe goes from 4.5KB to 0.85KB. And the 4.5KB is size optimised, the 0.8KB version isn't! (Both are packed - although a working exepacker would change things.) Oh well, if it's not available, it's not available. Huge thanks for checking!

You're welcome :)