XPC Resources

XPC is the preferred inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism on Apple platforms. XPC has three APIs:

• The high-level NSXPCConnection API, for Objective-C and Swift

• The low-level Swift API, introduced with macOS 14

• The low-level C API, which, while callable from all languages, works best with C-based languages

General:

• DevForums tag: XPC

• Creating XPC services documentation

• NSXPCConnection class documentation

• Low-level API documentation

• XPC has extensive man pages — For the low-level API, start with the xpc man page; this is the original source for the XPC C API documentation and still contains titbits that you can’t find elsewhere. Also read the xpcservice.plist man page, which documents the property list format used by XPC services.

• Daemons and Services Programming Guide archived documentation

• WWDC 2012 Session 241 Cocoa Interprocess Communication with XPC — This is no longer available from the Apple Developer website )-:

• Technote 2083 Daemons and Agents — It hasn’t been updated in… well… decades, but it’s still remarkably relevant.

• TN3113 Testing and Debugging XPC Code With an Anonymous Listener

• XPC and App-to-App Communication DevForums post

• Validating Signature Of XPC Process DevForums post

Related tags include:

• Inter-process communication, for other IPC mechanisms

• Service Management, for installing and uninstalling Service Management login items, launchd agents, and launchd daemons

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"