XPC is the preferred inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism on Apple platforms. XPC has three APIs:
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The high-level
NSXPCConnectionAPI, for Objective-C and Swift -
The low-level Swift API, introduced with macOS 14
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The low-level C API, which, while callable from all languages, works best with C-based languages
General:
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DevForums tag: XPC
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Creating XPC services documentation
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XPC has extensive man pages — For the low-level API, start with the
xpcman page; this is the original source for the XPC C API documentation and still contains titbits that you can’t find elsewhere. Also read thexpcservice.plistman page, which documents the property list format used by XPC services. -
Daemons and Services Programming Guide archived documentation
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WWDC 2012 Session 241 Cocoa Interprocess Communication with XPC — This is no longer available from the Apple Developer website )-:
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Technote 2083 Daemons and Agents — It hasn’t been updated in… well… decades, but it’s still remarkably relevant.
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TN3113 Testing and Debugging XPC Code With an Anonymous Listener
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XPC and App-to-App Communication DevForums post
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Validating Signature Of XPC Process DevForums post
Related tags include:
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Inter-process communication, for other IPC mechanisms
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Service Management, for installing and uninstalling Service Management login items,
launchdagents, andlaunchddaemons
Share and Enjoy
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"
