Mailing Lists: Apple Mailing Lists
 Image of Mac OS face in stamp
Re: [OT] Anyone home at Metrowerks?
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [OT] Anyone home at Metrowerks?

I apologize for helping continue this OT thread, this will be my only contribution.

I remember a number of C compilers for Mac OS

MPW C
Hippo
Consulair
Softworks
THINK (bought by Symantec)
GCC
There was a project that didn't survive the investors, written by Stoney Ballard (I think) called Object Programming Workshop (or something like it) which was a dynamic C++ like language...
MS C/C++ for Mac (cross compiler)
CW

I remember Pascal compilers too:

TML Pascal (that was for Mac, right?)
THINK Pascal
MPW Pascal
CW

I'm sure I'm missing one or two. When Symantec bought THINK, it started what I consider to be a serious downtrend in the viability of the THINK tools and thus how Mac developers work overall. By that time there was really only THINK/Symantec and MPW tools left on the machine, and an interest in kicking the tires of a new language called C++. When Metrowerks decided to go for it and create Codewarrior for PowerPC, Symantec had taken itself out of contention. Metrowerks Codewarrior was there for us at a critical time, and while the debugger was not as good as the THINK debuggers had been, the total package was still a good thing to have and I was happy to have it. MPW compilers were the key tool for larger works, but THINK worked very well for smaller stuff.

Metrowerks Codewarrior has had the best technical support of any of the compiler companies. Hands down. It is clear that for many reasons their attentions are now spread well across several code generators and sets of libraries. I expect that it is rough achieving reasonable economies of scale on OS X, so proportionately the average price for product updates has gone up. The product quality because of those darn bugs that show up at every major release hasn't been that great, but the bugs do eventually get fixed. CW is and has been a straight up development tool with very few bells and whistles, certainly appropriate for nuts and bolts developers but not addressing the same market as Delphi. I know a few developers who work on PCs, not because there's a lot more PCs out there and so things sell better, but because it's so much easier for them to develop working code with Delphi. CW does not compete well against a Mac-based Delphi-like product.

We in our shop had to switch from CW to Project Builder a few months ago for the Mac builds because CW wasn't getting us to where we had to be, and now we want to use a single machine to produce builds for multiple platforms using gcc, something that isn't going to happen with CW.

I like the IDE and I liked CW's Mac OS Classic debugger. I'm resolutely not thrilled by gdb.

If Metrowerks were to provide some support for Objective C on platforms other than Mac OS, that would be interesting to us. Really. It's already part of gcc, tho, there's only a tiny interest out there in general.

If someone were to come out with a good debugger for Mac OS X, that would diminish my personal desire for CW.

If someone were to make available a product as strong as Delphi for Mac OS X, it would be a tremendously appreciated product in a small pond. I realize that this is what Cocoa is supposed to be. Power it has, programmatic ease is some ways away.

I don't think the current model of charging 300+ dollars per new release is going to work for us when we can get basic multi-platform services for building C apps using gcc, unless we can get MW to provide the tools in as multiplatform a fashion as gcc. Say, for example, give us all the platforms that MW supports for 300 or so dollars per release for the compiler systems, as a single package, and separate the IDE, debug and much of the library support into a separate product. That way I can edit on one machine, build on one machine for several machines, and perhaps remote debug when native debugging isn't convenient, and I can purchase what library support is necessary ala cart.
_______________________________________________
carbon-development mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/carbon-development
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
References: 
 >Re: [OT] Anyone home at Metrowerks? (From: James Chandler Jr <email@hidden>)



Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations.
1-800-MY-APPLE

Contact Apple | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.