I’m a Windows programmer, Visual Basic 6 mostly. I’ve written CGI programs, data processing programs, and also front-ends. I’ve also programmed a Windows DLL using PowerBasic (PB/DLL.)
I know nothing about Macs. Suppose I want to write the equivalent of a DLL for Mac OSX, in Python. Written in Python, but with the function available to any OSX programming language. I guess a “dylib” is what I want to make? What sort of tools do I need? Simple and cheap is what I want. All my library needs to do is some basic file I/O and string manipulation. The basic external function call would amount to something like result = Lookup(keyfield)
I’ve been Googling this stuff half the day and it seems there are 100 different ways to do it, all of which may or may not work.
No, it’s free. You can download it for free but I think it comes on the install DVD. XCode is the IDE to use for any and all Mac programming. A search for ‘xcode python library template’ yielded a few promising starting points.