i. What You Need

Written by Walter Tyree

To follow along with the tutorials in this book, you’ll need the following:

• A Mac running macOS Ventura (13.3) or later. Earlier versions might work, but they’re untested.
• Xcode 14.3 or later. Packaged with Xcode is the latest and greatest version of LLDB, the debugger you’ll use extensively throughout this book. At the time of this writing, the version of LLDB packaged with Xcode is lldb-1403.0.17.64.
• Python 3. LLDB uses Python 3.9.6 to run its Python scripts. Unfortunately, Python no longer automatically ships with macOS. To Get Python, please see Appendix B: Getting Python for download instructions. You can verify you have the correct version installed by typing python --version in Terminal.
• A 64 bit iOS device running iOS 16 or later, and a paid membership to the iOS development program [optional]. For most chapters in the book, you can run any iOS programs in the Simulator. However, you’ll get more out of this book by using a 64-bit iOS device to test out certain ideas or suggestions littered throughout the book.

Once you have these items in place, you’ll be able to follow along with almost every chapter in this book. For certain sections, you’ll need to disable the Rootless security feature in order to use some of the tools (i.e. DTrace). This is discussed in Chapter 1.