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macOS XCode vs Unix tool Chain

A

Aranince

macrumors 65816
Original poster
I am developing a cross platform game using portable libraries and C++. My next computer is most likely going to be a Mac. My current development environment is Visual Studio C++ 2005 Express on XP. Because I've done quite a bit of stuff in the Linux world, I an fairly familiar to the Unix tool chain and very comfortable with the command line.

Which build environment should I use on the Mac? XCode or straight command line? Like I said, I am very comfortable with the command line(vim ftw), but is XCode good enough to be a great alternative to Visual Studio and for C++ programming?
 
Probably not. If you're doing Cocoa stuff, Xcode is pretty good (particularly as of 3.0), but it's not particularly impressive as a C++ IDE.
 
Aranince said:
I am developing a cross platform game using portable libraries and C++. My next computer is most likely going to be a Mac. My current development environment is Visual Studio C++ 2005 Express on XP. Because I've done quite a bit of stuff in the Linux world, I an fairly familiar to the Unix tool chain and very comfortable with the command line.

Which build environment should I use on the Mac? XCode or straight command line? Like I said, I am very comfortable with the command line(vim ftw), but is XCode good enough to be a great alternative to Visual Studio and for C++ programming?
Click to expand...

All Apple software (that is everything that is shipped by Apple), including the operating system, the iLife applications, the iPhone software, everything is developed using XCode. So if it is good enough for Apple, it should be good enough for you. Personally, I prefer XCode to Visual Studio.
 
Basically it's up to you. The command-line approach will work fine, but so will XCode. You could also use Eclipse or similar if you want.
 
When you compile in Xcode, it just invokes GCC anyhow, and Xcode's included with the operating system, so it's really a matter of personal preference as to whether you prefer Xcode or another editor that may or may not be able to organize files and invoke the compiler.
 
Aranince said:
I am developing a cross platform game using portable libraries and C++.
Click to expand...

If you need to be cross platform Xcode will not help you at all. I'd use GNU Autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool.) Ans yes you CAN build universal binaries without xcode, Apple provide command line tools for that
 
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