Oct 27, 2006, at 3:56 PM, Turtle Creek Software wrote: 1. Maybe if there are enough complaints, Apple will allocate more resources to improving XCode faster.
You are free to apply to our open position for an Xcode Engineer, or recommend someone who you think would help. The Development Tools team at Apple, as I've said before. is nearly 100 people, which is the largest it's ever been in Apple history (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our engineering organization) and a good deal larger than Metrowerks’s Mac team ever was (in fact, several members of that team are now with us at Apple).
The problem is not staffing levels or competence/expertise, it's just that there's an awful lot of work to do. Mac OS X is much larger (orders of magnitude so) and moving much faster than Mac OS 7/8/9. It took eight years to go from System 7 to 9.2.2. Mac OS X has been out for only 5 1/2 years and has released five major versions, with a sixth already in Developer Preview. In that time we did a complete refresh of NeXT's Project Builder and three updates to that, and in the last three years alone we did another substantial rewrite (Xcode 1.0), an update to that, another major release (Xcode 2.0), five updates to that (including a port to Intel), and a Developer Preview of a third major release (3.0).
Since Project Builder we've added multicore/multiprocessor compile support, code completion, network distributed builds, integrated documentation browsing, cross-development via SDKs, integrated SCM, integrated Unit Testing, Universal Binary support, support for 64-bit development, class modeling and data modeling, and fixed thousands of bugs and enhancement requests filed by developers. (I keep a database of every bug that mentions CodeWarrior and do a report ever release on how we are doing on addressing issues filed by CodeWarrior users). You can see what we've got planned for Xcode 3.0 or download the Developer Preview from the ADC Select/Premiere site. You'll see things like code folding, project snapshots, and refactoring— which are nowadays seen in Visual Studio and Eclipse, but were never in CodeWarrior. Maybe they will even do something dramatic that they wouldn't do otherwise, such as buy the CodeWarrior source and bring it up to speed for Intel etc. Throw in a few nice things from XCode, and call it XCode II or XCode Pro.
I think you can give up hope of Freescale letting go of what shards of Metrowerks they still own. They have a successful business selling it at a high price as the proprietary development environment for their processors, which Apple no longer uses. 2. If the above doesn't happen, maybe someone else will see a need and a market, and bring out the next great IDE, to follow in the footsteps of Symantec and Metrowerks. I think they did both make some money at it, at least for a while.
The sad truth is that there is not a market for for-pay C/C++ IDEs, on the Mac or anywhere. It costs a lot (we spend tens of millions of dollars a year on it). The price the market will bear is relatively low, and the open source world (cf. Eclipse) makes it difficult for any company to recoup its investment in the tools space. Metrowerks was acquired and dismantled. Symantec is out of the Developer Tools business. Borland's Turbo C++ is $400 for the "pro" version (but they make their money on the $2,500-per-seat Enterprise edition). Eclipse is a fine IDE for Java but really hasn't made headway in the C++ space (yet).
But the crucial point of all of this is that if Apple had been in 2005 in the position we were in in 1993—where we had a weak Developer Tools team and utter dependence on third parties to do a major hardware transition—we simply could not have made the Intel transition, period, and there would not be a 30% y/y growth in Mac sales this quarter.
We here in the Xcode group exist to deliver great tools to you, and we're working hard on every release to improve them. We have a tight schedule, a long list of desired features, a longer list of bugs to fix, finite resources, and an unwieldy and ornery legacy code base. But that's not unfamiliar to anybody here, I expect.
File bugs on what you want fixed, and mention CodeWarrior. Provide specific, detailed steps of the workflow that worked for you (surprise: even though a lot of us used CodeWarrior, you may have used it in a different way than we did; people's workflows differ). And please remember that civility is always appreciated by people working at 2am to implement the enhancements you're requesting.
Regards,
Chris Espinosa Apple |