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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T18:00:46+00:00

I want to use the ASSIMP library http://assimp.sourceforge.net in an iOS project. Unfortunately, I’m

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I want to use the ASSIMP library http://assimp.sourceforge.net in an iOS project. Unfortunately, I’m not very experienced with makefiles and that stuff, so I need some help.

I’ve downloaded the sources and first I tried to build with make (in the code-subfolder)
In the makefile I’ve added INCLUDEFLAGS = -I/Lib because my boost header-files are in /Lib/boost
Executing make static succeeds with some warnings. A static library (.a) is generated.

Then I tried to add the .a-file to my xcode-project and specified the assimp-header folder as additional include directory (Other Search Paths). Linking failed with the message that the library has not the right architecture (i386 required for the simulator)

file libassimp.a outputs: “libassimp.a: current ar archive random library”

How can I build the library for the i386 architcture and for arm6 or arm7, whatever I need on an iOS device?

Is it ok to use the boost-headers only or is it better/necessary to build boost as a library? Currently I’m using boost headers only, which should be fine since boost is a header only library?!

There is also a cmake – makefile (CMakeLists.txt). cmake is the recommended way of building the library but I don’t have any experience with cmake.

Or another thought: Is it possible to build a library via xcode?
The final result should be a library for i386, arm6 and arm7 architecture.

What shall I do? And how?

Edit:

I’ve just discovered that there are the following preprocessor checks in the file aiDefines.h:

#if defined(_MSC_VER)
    // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b0084kay.
#   if defined(_M_IX86)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_X86_32BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   elif defined(_M_X64)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_X86_64BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   elif defined(_M_IA64)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_IA_64BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   else
#       error unknown architecture
#   endif
#elif defined(__GNUC__)
    // See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Predefined-Macros.html.
#   if defined(__x86_32__) || defined(__i386__)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_X86_32BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   elif defined(__x86_64__)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_X86_64BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   elif defined(__ppc__)
#       define ASSIMP_BUILD_PPC_32BIT_ARCHITECTURE
#   else
#       error unknown architecture
#   endif
#else
#   error unknown compiler
#endif

Does this mean, it is not possible to compile the ASSIMP library for ARM architecture?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I personally don’t do any iOS development, but I know that others have successfully compiled Assimp for their iDevices using Xcode. An Xcode 3 project should be included with the distribution, although I don’t know if you can use it without further modification.

    The architecture preprocessor defines are currently only used for logging output (in code/Importer.cpp), and support for ARM has been added to trunk in the meantime (r919, to be exact).

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