Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push

An anonymous reader writes "Apple released to developers the 'gold master' version of Mac OS 10.7, known as Lion, in a move that positions the company for a July roll-out. 'With Snow Leopard, Apple's previous Mac OS release, the time between going from gold master status to hitting store shelves was approximately two weeks. However that release required Apple to stamp and produce boxed discs to send out to retail stores. Lion will be the first by Apple to be released only through its Mac App Store as a digital download.'"

Comments

That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[JohnG]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range. I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[RedBear]

XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Shin-LaC]

Apple contributed a lot of changes upstream, but they were not merged. At some point, they stopped and decided to focus on LLVM instead.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there, because of GPLv3. LLVM produces much better code than GCC 4.2.1, which is the last GPLv2 version, and the version that Apple ships.

Also, be aware that none of those benchmarks were for Objective-C, which is the language that Apple cares the most about. In terms of features, GCC now lags there. It doesn't support automatic reference counting, for example, and this gives a nice performance boost when coupled with the optimisations in LLVM (fewer autoreleased objects, faster reference count modifications, complete elision of some operations where it can prove that retains and releases are not needed).

Clang is also pretty modular. If you use XCode, the IDE is doing syntax highlighting using the same front end that it uses for compiling with clang. It's displaying error messages as you type via the same mechanism. The integrated static analysis and ARC migration tools are also implemented as Clang libraries and just called from XCode.