Re:Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.
by sjs on Saturday November 12, 2011 @05:55PM
(#3229172)
> Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.
If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM. There is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from doing this. The truth is that nobody actually minds installing Xcode to get a compiler. Or at least the few who do don't actually care enough to do something about it.
Re:Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.
by mrgordon on Friday November 18, 2011 @10:56PM
(#3254519)
As someone who works at a software startup where the engineers use Macs, trust me we mind when we have to dig around to find the correct Xcode installer for Snow Leopard or whatever. Just because Apple has decided Xcode 4 should be in the app store, does not mean that our developers running Snow Leopard (which has fewer bugs with our mission critical apps like vagrant, for example) should be SOL.
People who realize how stupid it is to install several gigabytes of Xcode for a C compiler also tend to get irked by other weird Apple policies, thus a significant percentage of them switch operating systems instead of packaging up GCC to try and change the Apple ecosystem.
Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.