Modern Mac Development?

CDarklock asks: "I'm getting seriously interested in setting a new Mac next to my Windows box (to replace the Mac SE, which should tell you about how long it's been). But on Linux and Windows, I'm accustomed to writing lots of custom apps in C++ to fill the gaps around the system, but I haven't written anything on a Mac for something like fifteen years. As a professional Windows developer, what sort of expense am I facing to outfit a new Mac with development tools comparable to Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, and what sort of learning curve should I expect?"

Comments

Re:is this..

[amichalo]

There is more to developing on a Mac than downloading Xcode.

I think the thread is worth exploring. There is a learning curve to moving from Windows to OS X in general, and more to learn when switching as a developer. The move from Linux to OS X is far less of a curve, but still exists.

Let's give the thread a chance!

Re:As a Windows programmer..

[Paradox]

Look, it's one thing to say "I had a bad experience with XCode." It's another to say, "XCode is the worst thing ever." I can't even find words to describe how juvenille calling an IDE "stupid" is in this context.

When you just want to build a damn executable it has you messing with build targets and all sorts of garbage that I will never care about.

Umm, it starts out working with sane defaults. In practice, I almost never need to mess with those settings until the very last steps of my application. Not the beginning. The only thing you might mess with in there is what libraries you link, but that's the wrong place to add them.

Sorry, but I liked my old way of working - you know, where I was productive and didn't have to learn the quirks of your stupid IDE.

You're advocating Eclipse and claim you don't have time to learn the quirks of a "stupid IDE"? Gee, that's the pot calling the kettle black, don't you think? Eclipse is one of the single most... erhem... "feature rich" products I've ever seen. Learning it is more of a chore than learning emacs, and that's saying something.

If I was ONLY developing for the Mac I might take the time to learn it.. but I'm not, so I will never waste my time on it.

XCode is-say it with me now-a OS X Application Development Environment. If you're expecting it to be something else, prepare to have those expectations failed. It can do a lot, and it's a complete, lightweight IDE with a very natural way of organizing OS X projects and integrating with IB.

... AND I still get command-line compilation if I don't feel like using an IDE that day.

You never lose it using XCode. xcodemake has always been there.

It sounds like you had unreasonable expectations for XCode, and they weren't met. And now you think it's the tool's fault for being nothing more than what it is.