No More Codewarrior for Mac OS X

wandazulu writes "According to an announcement posted on the Carbon developer's mailing list, Metrowerks announced at AdHoc that the forthcoming release of CodeWarrior 10 will be the last for Mac OS X. This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market, but it's still the end of an era. CodeWarrior literally saved Apple's bacon during the transition to PowerPC in the early 1990s by shipping the first working set of developer tools for the new platform. And since then CodeWarrior has been the main toolkit for commercial development on the Mac (especially pre-Xcode)."

Comments

Do you know what 'literally' means?

[Anonymous Coward]

"CodeWarrior literally saved Apple's bacon during the transition to PowerPC in the early 1990s..."

Then Steve-the-vegan came back and banished the bacon forever!

Re:Do you know what 'literally' means?

[hahiss]

My head literally explodes when people do this kind of thing.

And, oy, does my wife complain about the mess. . . .

Won't compile for Intel

[Jerry Smith]

BUT Rosetta ought to be able to take care of that, and since PPC will still be a operational platform for the Mac for 3 years, maybe more, it's not thát desastrous. I'll miss them though, good ole Codewarrior.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice á, you Canadian bástard.

In Soviet Russia, Television Can't Do Thát On You.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[Cmdr-Absurd]

BUT Rosetta ought to be able to take care of that, and since PPC will still be a operational platform for the Mac for 3 years, maybe more, it's not thát desastrous. I'll miss them though, good ole Codewarrior.

This is not at all what Rosetta is for. Rosetta is there to allow one to run legacy ppc code on intel. When one is writing new code -- using Code Warrior, xCode, or whatever -- one uses that tool to compile code that is native to the target machine(s). No self-respecting developer would compile a Mac app that would run only with the help of an emulator.

Take a look at the universal binary guidelines.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[ShieldW0lf]

No self-respecting developer would compile a Mac app that would run only with the help of an emulator.

This just in... Java developers have no self respect.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[geoffspear]

Java doesn't require an emulator to run.

On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean that Java developers do have any self respect.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[galimore]

Rosetta isn't an emulator, you insensitive clod!

It's an instruction translator, much like Java translates byte code into native code.

Re:Won't compile for Intel

[ShieldW0lf]

The only difference between an emulator and a virtual machine is that an emulator emulates a real machine and a virtual machine emulates an imaginary one.

where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[blackcoot]

do they have enough business in the embedded sector that this isn't going to hurt them, or has apple's move to intel basically screwed them beyond hope of recovery?

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[LKM]

Since they're owned by Motorola, they're not going anywhere. Among other processor architectures, most PPC based hardware will use Metrowerk's compilers. The Gamecube, for example, uses them.

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[Farmer Tim]

IIRC, Metrowerks only supplied processors for the laptops and (even less sure) the Mini: peanuts compared to the embedded market.

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[robbieduncan]

Metroworks have not supplied processors for anything (at least in the context of this story). The supplied a suite of development tools (you know a compiler and stuff).

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[marat]

Cannot say for sure - time will tell, - but if you want to develop for Symbian UIQ you have to choose between Borland and Codewarrior, and people say Borland is a joke even despite it's free. This is quite a market, and it's only growing, and there's no Microsoft there. Probably it's already wider than Apple market was for them.

On the other hand, Visual Studio works for me, although completely unofficially. Been too lazy to install another IDE :)

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[mcgroarty]

And the Gamecube isn't going anywhere either. *nod*

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[LKM]

And the Gamecube isn't going anywhere either.

In case you haven't yet noticed, all new consoles use PPC chips like the Gamecube. So Gamecube-like consoles are in fact going everywhere. I don't know if Metrowerks CodeWarrior is the dev environment of choice for these three new consoles, but since the cube also used IBM's flavour of PPC chips and not Moto's, but CodeWarrior was used anyway, I guess there's a big chance it's going to be used for the new consoles, too.

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[mgs1000]

Codewarrior for Symbian was sold to Nokia last year. (including the development team)

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[jamus]

Metrowerks is now owned by Freescale, which was spun off from Motorola.

Metrowerks' About Page

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[LKM]

Right, you're correct. In my mind, Moto and Freescale are still kind of one entity :-)

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[SmittyTheBold]

Well, MS has XNA, so most developers will be using Visual Studio-derived tools for XB360 development. I don't know about Sony's development system, but it makes sense to assume Nintendo will continue to use CodeWarrior.

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[mcgroarty]

"I guess there's a big chance it's going to be used for the new consoles, too."

It's not. (Which is too bad, because I liked CodeWarrior for PS2 and GC quite a bit.)

FWIW, I was playing a word game with "not going anywhere," not making comment about the technology.

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[LKM]

"I guess there's a big chance it's going to be used for the new consoles, too."

It's not. (Which is too bad, because I liked CodeWarrior for PS2 and GC quite a bit.)

Do you happen to know what the PS3 is going to use? Something from IBM?

Re:where is metrowerks going to go from here?

[mcgroarty]

Sony bought SN Systems, makers of ProDG. ProDG is GCC and a proprietary debugger.

CodeWarrior stopped being premier 3 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Some interesting statistics:

83% of Mac developers use XCode primarily
74% of commercial Mac developers use XCode primarily.

Commercial being Microsoft, Symantec, and companies of that size.

CodeWarrior was a great product, but this isn't near as big a loss as the story text implies. Most CodeWarrior users have long since moved over to XCode.

Mainly because PowerPlant was much harder to use imo.

Who? Oh...

[Graymalkin]

MetroWerks officially leaving the Mac development market is a move that has been a long time coming. They started up in the early 90s about the time Symantec began to lose interest in Mac development. Symantec's management got their eye on other technologies and the Mac Dev group and their products suffered from managerial disinterest. CodeWarrior swarmed the scene with a fast compiler, a good debugger, a nice GUI, and a really nice class library (PowerPlant). It wasn't long before PowerPlant had won over the lionshare of Mac development from MPW/MacApp and ThinkC/TCL. Unfortunately after they went public in 1994 they never really managed to turn a profit. They held on for quite a while because Apple subsidized them with development contracts, a huge site license, and even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.

Apple's subsidies were propping up MetroWerks and when Apple started looking like a losing horse they started porting their dev tools to every platform they could. They haven't really put much effort into their Mac product since the late-90s when they started their shotgun approach to product development. They basically took their IDE and debugger and ported them to every damn platform they could find. None of their ports were really planned out, they just hoped one or two would stick and pay for the rest of the company. As they moved into new markets they put their existing products essentially in maintenance mode. They were on the verge of bankruptcy when they got Motorola to buy them out in 1999. When Motorola spun off their chip division as Freescale they sent MetroWerks with it.

There was little chance of MetroWerks supporting Apple's move to Intel, they hardly support Apple on PowerPC chips. Most of what used to be MetroWerks is now Freescale supporting Freescale products. What used to be the MetroWerks of old is long gone.

Apple is smart to release their own usable IDE and give it away to anyone that wants it. It lowers the barrier of entry to Mac development to simply purchasing a Mac. If you want to write the Next Big Thing you can plunk down a few bucks for a Mac mini and sign up for a free ADC account and a couple of mailing lists. Just a few years ago the only feasible option would be to fork over a few hundred dollars to MetroWerks or suffer with a painfully outdated MPW. Apple also gets to be really flexible with their architectures as the Intel switch is showing. Symantec's decline in interest on the Mac could have doomed the PowerPC lines if MetroWerks hadn't come along when it did. What happened to Symantec is now happing to MetroWerks. Instead of waiting for someone else to rescue Mac develop efforts Apple made Project Builder good and called it Xcode.

Re:Who? Oh...

[bar-agent]

...even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.

Well, MetroWerks did have good swag. I still wear my "Blood, Sweat, and Code" t-shirt, and I love the "factory floor" scenes they put on some of their stuff.

Re:Who? Oh...

[Trillan]

Yeah, what you said. The last major improvement in Codewarrior was the ability to open multiple projects at once. I asked for a Delete Line command back with Codewarrior 7 Gold (1994-ish), Codewarrior Pro 8 still didn't have it. Anyone who didn't notice the writing on the wall years ago has been living in a happy, happy fantasy world.

The end of MacHack

[CokeBear]

The more significant news this weekend is that this was the last MacHack/ADHOC conference. It was one of the best, and will be missed.

Re:The end of MacHack

[BurntNickel]

Why is it ending? I used to go when I was a student, but I haven't been able to attend since then. It was always a great experience.

Great

[core]

I make a really good living selling games for Mac (most indie developers think that if a game isn't a big hit on PC it won't be on Mac.. oh well less competition).

The news about CW are terrible. xcode is really, really bad; it's probably easier to use gcc with your own build scripts and text editor. I've made Atlantis (http://www.funpause.com/atlantis/) in about 250 hours with codewarrior and ptk; with xcode I don't know how long it would have taken. Even compilation on xcode is slow, thanks to gcc 4.0-apple :P The game is already well paid back for now tho.

Re:Great

[argent]

Atlantis is certainly a great variant of games like Pengapop, but surely most of the time in development was spent on those cool steampunk graphics?

Re:Great

[core]

Actually I worked almost 100% in parallel with the graphics guy. The coding was done in about 250 hours. I seriously think CW (and ptk, http://www.phelios.com/ptk/, a toolkit to make 2D games for PC and Mac with rendering to DX or OpenGL) helped a lot for that tho. The game renders at like 200fps on the mac mini I just got myself as an extra testing machine (got a $500 mini to debug a problem for someone that bought the game for $20, heh -- at least I got it fixed!).

Best regards,
Emmanuel

Re:Great

[argent]

You're a lucky guy, you actually had a customer report the problem, instead of flaming you about it on some web board you never heard of. That's easily worth a few hundred bucks.

(personally, I hate GUI compilers, I much prefer to work with a Makefile and "vi" ... REAL "vi", too, not this horrid "vim" thing Apple started shipping with Panther... luckily "nvi" builds easily on OSX)

Re:Great

[Listen Up]

I hate command-line compilers. Typing out 1000 different switches and options by hand and running through text screens of compile-time output is not productive nor intuitive.

Re:Great

[Listen Up]

PS - The best and most enjoyable/rewarding programming and debugging I have ever done in my life are when I use a GUI IDE and GUI Compiler. There are a million reasons to use a GUI IDE and GUI Compiler and never touch the command-line again. If you actually believe that command-line programming and command-line compiling are the best, then you have very obviously never programmed above the level of Hello World, regardless of what you say in your reply to this post.

Re:Great

[argent]

Typing out 1000 different switches and options by hand...

Doesn't happen. You type "make" and it does it all for you. The first program I wrote for VAXC on VMS was an implementation of Make... and this was back before the Macintosh existed.

In the rare case where you need command line options, you put them in a Make variable and it uses them everywhere.

Then for the output, there's this great program called "error" that I first ran into at Berkeley in 1981. You pipe your output through that, and it puts all the errors in the files as comments and can even toss you into the editor right at the first one.

Most of the great features of GUI compiler tools already existed in command line tools back before there really was a general purpose GUI to implement them in.

Re:Great

[CableModemSniper]

What's wrong with vim? If you don't change the default settings it pretty much acts as dumb as vi.

Re:Great

[CableModemSniper]

**does a man error** Holy shit that's cool.

Re:Great

[argent]

What's wrong with vim?

It's a superficial emulation of vi at best.

If you don't change the default settings it pretty much acts as dumb as vi.

If your understanding of vi is so shallow that you think "it pretty much acts as dumb as vi" is an amusing bon-mot, you probably wouldn't understand the answer.

Re:Great

[CableModemSniper]

If your understanding of vi is so shallow that you think "it pretty much acts as dumb as vi" is an amusing bon-mot, you probably wouldn't understand the answer.

1. I wasn't going for a "bon-mot". I really wanted to know what it did 'wrong'.
2. Try me.

Re:Great

[argent]

I'm sorry, I just get so many damn idiots cracking wise about vi that I get really tired of it.

The thing about vi is that it's not really a modal editor. That is, the way the editing commands work don't really match very well to the idea of a "mode". If you think of it as being a command-based editor like TECO, but with better feedback, it's a lot more comfortable to use.

So you don't hit "i" to go into "insert mode", and "ESC" to go to "command mode", you enter a single command "iwhatever the text isESC".

When I'm using vim, every now and then... maybe as often as every few minutes when I'm doing a lot of little changes, it doesn't quite model this properly... it acts like it's doing modal stuff. I don't know exactly where it does it, I'm not watching for it... I just find myself with my fingers out of sync with vim.

Ov the "vi" clones, only "elvis" has avoided this kind of problem.

I prefer "nvi", I've gotten used to it, I really like the way its undo stack works. It's real "vi". But "vim" just isn't. It's like, oh, a Casiotone next to a Yamaha DX-7. Neither of them is a modern synth, but you wouldn't mistake one for the other.

Re:Great

[CableModemSniper]

Interesting. Just to clarify what I meant by "dumb" wasn't supposed to be insulting to vi, I could see how Vim syntax highlighting auto-indentation, incremental search and stuff like that could be annoying if turned on by default, so that was the kind of stuff I assumed bothered you. I'm not sure I get what you mean by it not really being modal...I'm thinking about trying elvis for a while to see if I get what you mean.

Re:Great

[argent]

Oh no, VIM is an evil sham even without the cosmetics added.

I'm not sure I get what you mean by it not really being modal.

If it was modal, then when you type "i" you would just change mode. You would then type a bunch of stuff and then hit "ESC". At this point if you hit "u" for undo it would undo the last character you typed. Instead, it undoes everything between the "i" and the "esc". Because what really happened is you executed an "insert this text" command, that started with the "i" and went on to the "ESC".

You can hit "redo" and redo the insert command.

You can enter "3i...ESC" and insert "..." 3 times.

Re:Great

[CableModemSniper]

Aha! Now I see what you mean. Thats actually quite enlightening. Vi really isn't modal.

Why?

[Erik K. Veland]

Yes, why? Their website only say it is so. No press releases. No explanations.

Re:Why?

[CokeBear]

The official reason is that MacHack is ending because it is no longer profitable for ExpoTech. There were less than 100 attendees this year. Unofficially, there are several reasons going back a few years. A book could be written on all the background, but suffice it to say here that there were two groups of people with different ideas about how the conference should be run, those ideas were incompatible, and the whole thing fell apart. Some would say the last MacHack was in 2003, but others tried to keep it alive as "ADHOC" http://www.adhocconference.com/
Alas, it was not to be. Like a fish out of water, it flopped around for a while, and finally died.

FUD!

[andy55]

83% of Mac developers use XCode primarily
74% of commercial Mac developers use XCode primarily.

Source?? This is FUD, and that's the reason the parent poster was AC--ugh!

If you read the xcode apple maillist or develop mac os software for large scale apps, you'd know the figures are actually around the opposite. The truth of the matter is that the latest version of Xcode, 2.1, still has *major* potholes for any medium sized or larger projects. A simple read through the last few weeks of the xcode users apple maillist will reveal this--CodeWarrior users are furious since they're effectively being told that they need to use Xcode (b/c of the intel switch) while Xcode is a far cry from being able to swallow medium (or larger) projects (I myself am in this situation).

Xcode 2.2 promises to stop of the bleeding, but even one of the apple xcode devs said point blank that many of the UI inadequacies won't be addressed until the "next major release" (meaning Xcode 3! -- how far is *that* off?). And then there's GCC 4.0 being broken for certain things. Sure, this has nothing to do with Xcode, but it's more reason CW people like myself are still totally turned off from making the switch.

Anyway, what's more scary is the wacko who posted the parent comment--to just blatantly make up weird shit like that--wtf.

Re:FUD!

[mithras the prophet]

Apple does manage to use XCode for OS X, yes? And certainly all the iApps. What about the pro apps like Shake, Motion, Final Cut, ProTools -- are those on XCode?

Re:FUD!

[andy55]

Apple does manage to use XCode for OS X, yes? And certainly all the iApps. What about the pro apps like Shake, Motion, Final Cut, ProTools -- are those on XCode?

Apple uses Xcode, yes, but many of the large "commercial" apps the original post was referring use carbon. It's highly speculated that at the last WWDC, the purpose of all the rah-rah-rah of Xcode and all the speakers telling us how great it is to move to Xcode was to get the mountain of codewarrior users was to get us switch to Xcode.

But don't take my word for it--just read the last few weeks the xcode apple maillist (http://lists.apple.com/). You'll find lots of posts talking about how painful Xcode is to use in various respects compared to CW and lots of posts about cross compiling for 10.3 and 10.2.

Re:FUD!

[Guy Harris]

Apple uses Xcode, yes, but many of the large "commercial" apps the original post was referring use carbon.

Presumably you meant "use CodeWarrior"; using Carbon doesn't, as far as I know, prevent you from using XCode.

Re:FUD!

[andy55]

Apple uses Xcode, yes, but many of the large "commercial" apps the original post was referring use carbon.>/i>

Presumably you meant "use CodeWarrior"; using Carbon doesn't, as far as I know, prevent you from using XCode.

I did mean carbon, actually. CW's cocoa support is always 6+ months behind the curve (if not grossly more) and is widely considered to not be a viable option for serious cocoa development. From everyhing I know and see, it's for two reasons: 1) apple (purposely) does not proactively work with metrowerks to keep their mac os support current (for obvious reasons) and 2), metrowerks management is decreasingly concerned about mac os support as their other (ie, embedded) customers continue to become their primary customer base.

"FUD" is a probably a bad guess

[AHumbleOpinion]

I do not see an incosistency between the orginal post's "83% of Mac developers use XCode primarily. 74% of commercial Mac developers use XCode primarily." and your "Xcode, 2.1, still has *major* potholes for any medium sized or larger projects." Small projects will outnumber medium and large. Small companies, individuals, and hobbyists will outnumber medium and large companies.

Also, some of those still using CodeWarrior are not doing so out of love. They are doing so because they are using legacy code or technologies not supported by XCode.

I'm not slamming CodeWarrior. I was there when they came onto the scene and Symantec fumbled. However when Apple started giving away a credible(*) IDE and compiler developers could see this day coming and developers should have started getting their code ready. They've had years.

(*) MrC was great at the time.

Intel decision wasn't a blood oath

[fm6]

This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market...

That's silly. Has Metrowerks suddenly developed an allergy to generating x86 code? I doubt it. More likely they decided that there are too many competing Windows and Linux products for them to make a profit selling to the PC market. But their OS X expertise would give them an edge in the Intel/Mac world, even if other x86 vendors decide to start offering Mac development tools. Obviously they've decided the Mac marketplace isn't important enough to justify the cost following Apple to the new architecture.

Re:Intel decision wasn't a blood oath

[dair]

Has Metrowerks suddenly developed an allergy to generating x86 code? I doubt it.

Pretty much - they sold their x86 tools to Nokia a month or so before WWDC, and that type of transfer typically includes a "you don't get to claw it back later" clause. Which I guess would have been a reasonable thing to agree to at the time, as what are the chances Apple are going to switch to x86...

Re:Intel decision wasn't a blood oath

[fm6]

OK, you obviously know the issues better than I do. But why on earth did Nokia buy up x86 tools? Aren't most smart phones xscale?

Re:Intel decision wasn't a blood oath

[bcombee]

Nokia uses the x86 tools as part of their simulator toolset, letting you build a Symbian application for a Win32 library and debugging it on the desktop before building it for the harder to work with hardware.

Gosh Darn it !!

[stevebenson]

Thats to bad I was really looking forward to a newer version after this one its to bad they are scrapping it after this release ;-( I had to check the story out myself by doing some searching and its seems your right.

adobe?

[zojas]

what about adobe? a pro photoshop user friend of mine wants to colloborate on some photoshop plugins. anybody know how soon adobe will be switching to xcode? I really don't want to go buy the dead-end code warrior...

Not just GCC...

[CreateWindowEx]

SN now has their own in-house C++ compiler. Uptake for the PS2 has been pretty slow because it came so late in the product cycle and is taking a while to mature; however I believe that SNC is the primary compiler for PSP, and after the Sony acquisition I can imagine it will become the standard PS3 compiler (although GCC probably has better support for PPC than MIPS, so it might be harder for SN to make their compiler competitive).

Revolution will probably be stuck with Codewarrior (bleah), unless someone else besides SN gets into the GCC custom support business.

I wonder if every cross-console tool provider will be acquired by one of the console makers or EA. Who's next; RAD tools?

Motorola / Freescale / Metrowerks

[dave1212]

Motorola / Freescale owns Metrowerks, and is probably still ticked about the lack of any chance of working with Apple again.