RhinoCommon NuGet Package cannot load rhinocommon_c without Rhino Program

[nathanletwory (Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory)]

@xliotx

As McNeel now step into the macOS side

MacOS has been supported already for years, for plug-in development via RhinoCommon. Or did you mean the Rhino C++ SDK.

I integrate Cycles into Rhino to power Raytraced (since Rhino 6) and Rhino Render (since Rhino 7). Cycles itself is C++, the integration plug-in RhinoCycles is C#.

@xliotx

Additionally, there’s no need to maintain and compile code on two different platforms – all can be done from github action.

You can use GitHub actions to build for all supported platforms. For instance our rhino3dm, which is our wrapper around OpenNURBS for Python (rhino3dm · PyPI), Javascript (rhino3dm - npm) and .NET (NuGet Gallery | Rhino3dm 8.17.0) is fully built using GitHub actions for all the platforms you can see, and for multiple versions - the version/language/OS matrix is quite large.

You should have a look at GitHub - mcneel/Rhino.Testing: NUnit dotnet unit testing for Rhino3D to set up testing to run within Rhino. You can refer to Automated testing with Rhino ✅ to find out how to do that with GitHub actions as well, including using Rhino in a GitHub action.

@xliotx

But when dealing with mesh class, the rhino_c.dll cannot be used.

As mentioned before, RhinoCommon requires Rhino to run properly. See the previous paragraph with link to post to set up unit testing in GitHub actions so that you can use and test RhinoCommon.

@xliotx

keeping that compiled lib closed seems to be a kind of an over-protected solution, IMHO.

See the earlier paragraph on setting up testing in GitHub actions.