Mac OS X as a development platform
 

Recently I am thinking of changing my 5-year-old Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB RAM desktop to something with Core 2 Duo. In the old day I could have just got another PC and got on. But since iMac now comes with the chip as well, I might as well give it a try.

Although I am owning an iBook G4, I seldom use it as a development platform(except for making some small Java tools with Eclipse). So I would like to know how well does Mac OS X fare as a development platform, and how useful is Xcode in developing cross-platform softwares(wxWidgets, GTK, etc.).

Any inputs are welcome.

Thanks :)

I've not used a Mac, but you may search for Objective-C, NextStep and GNUstep. Xcode uses gcc and it can be used for cross-platform development, but the Cocoa and Carbon APIs are part of what makes Xcode different from other gcc-based IDEs. OpenGL is fully supported, so if you use only free libraries and OpenGL the apps will be cross-platform.

Either way, you will have a machine with OS X and "virtualization acelerated on hardware". Fussion (VMware for Mac) and Parallels are in a competition to take advantage of it. OS X as a base platform + virtualized OSs should be great for software development. It's x86 too, making the Mac "safe" (you can forget about OS X and use GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc).

Works great. All the tools that you need are right there, and very sophisticated. The environment is Unix, but the tools are nice and refined.

Incidentally, most stock distributions of OS/X come with the development tools right there. They might not be installed by default but they should be supplied.

Having programmed a bit in emacs, I was so stunned by variety and selections of XCode I'd be amazed* if you won't find it to suit your needs. You can compile just like in any unix/linux, mostly same libraries and you can add your own.

* I stopped using xcode before even bothering to learn it, my need to code was too small for that application

Xcode is brilliant.

Objective-C is a really nice language, and since it is a superset of ANSI C, you can compile most C programs with it. Cocoa has classes for just about everything you could ever need, and Interface Builder makes it easy to create a GUI.

I don't know about creating cross-platform apps, but OS X is Posix compliant. Cocoa also supports Java in addition to Objective-C

--Ian

Thanks for the replies.

Came upon this worth reading article:
http://developer.apple.com/unix/crossplatform.html