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Comment by sabat | Hacker News Reader

Compared to what other platform? Windows? Developer support out-of-the-box on Windows?

Linux, sure, but Linux is since its inception a developer's OS. Mac OS lies somewhere in between. There are many happy developers running OS X, and paying $5 for XCode doesn't make me mad enough to rant. Dude, it's $5. You paid nearly that for Angry Birds.

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Not every non-US developer have a credit card. Particularly if you are talking about young students. Windows SDK (That means: Compiler, Linker, Libs, Docs and Headers) is a free download from MSFT site. You only pay if you are a masochist and want to use Visual Studio.

I'll pay $100 for Xcode and not use it and not even care. We're not the point. It's the casual users that want to get into a library that I'm concerned about. That want to use a C library on their machine. That want to use ImageMagick in their PHP site. Those are the ones that an unavailable gcc hurt the most.

It's the casual users that want to use ImageMagick in their PHP site?!

No offence intended, but I think we have different definitions of "casual user"...

Apple's gcc is freely available and open source. If you have a specific reason for non-programmers to need a C compiler on their machine, you can even make an installer for it.

It will make me mad IF Apple does not release Xcode outside the fucking App Store. I do not care paying for an IDE, that I do not use, but I still want a compiler, some assemblers (nasm and gas), and a working linker.

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