Unless you’re a programmer, be it a software developer for Apple systems or some other platform, you might never have heard of a Build System before. But it’s time you have, because this could be big…
A Build System is basically a set of programs that work in unison to turn raw code from a programming language into a working output program. Pretty much every major programming language has one, and if you’re a jailbreak tweak developer, then you’ve probably used one called Theos before.
Having said all that, waves are being made by one developer named ja1dan who shared a post this weekend on /r/jailbreak about a brand new Build System especially for jailbreak tweak developers called Luz, and as you might come to expect, it could improve jailbreak tweak development workflows tremendously.
In the Luz documentation page, we learn that Luz was written in pure Python and that it was designed for Apple Darwin-based systems with speed in mind. In fact, the developer claims that Luz is up to three times faster than Theos, and marginally faster than the competing Dragon Build System. Below, you will find a Terminal-based benchmark comparing Luz to Theos:
One of the major advantages of Luz is that it can build projects with submodules in parallel, which means that the building time of a project only takes as long as the longest submodule would take to build. This contributes to its speed advantages.
Another big deal with Luz is that the developer says it comes with out-of-the-box rootless support, with the rootless file structure being enabled by default. This is especially important, as modern jailbreaks on iOS & iPadOS 15 and later are expected to take rootless forms because of changes in Apple’s software security.
It seems like Luz has the potential to make jailbreak tweak development more streamlined for the latest jailbreaks, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see more jailbreak tweak developers taking advantage of it.
Obviously, this isn’t something that end users will appreciate as much as jailbreak tweak developers will, but end users should be happy to see a new support system that makes jailbreak tweak developers’ lives easier because it could mean more jailbreak tweak releases in the future as we move to the rootless jailbreak dynamic.
The Luz project is fully open source on the developer’s GitHub page for anyone interested in learning more about it. Installation looks incredibly simple, requiring just one Terminal command.
Are you excited to see how Luz transforms the landscape of jailbreak tweak development going forward? Let us know in the comments section down below.