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Comment by redbeard0x0a | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Apple pulled all the compilers and supporting apps into the app bundle itself, it no longer needs a /Developer folder on your machine. I believe this will make things a lot easier for those of us who develop web applications with things like ruby, python or help with compiling/installing open source apps using tools like homebrew. We should now be able to install our own GCC and Xcode on the same machine without having to deal with conflicting environments and defaults.

The initial trouble is going to be installing a normal gcc on your machine, a normal user can't compile a compiler without a compiler. I expect a nice installable binary package that is intended to be used with rvm, ruby and homebrew before too long...

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Or you can have the user download the command line tools seperately and install those without first downloading Xcode. A 160MB download instead of a 1.72GB download.

I like the sound of that. While I recognize Xcode's aptness and broad qualities, I'm still really the Makefile'n'text editor kinda developer.

Yes, I'm actually checking to see if it contains a plain gcc compiler (like Xcode 4.1 did), currently the llvm-gcc that is symlinked with /usr/bin/gcc with Xcode 4.2 doesn't work too well with software from rvm and homebrew.

edit: I just pulled down the Unix developer tools, it comes with llvm-gcc and clang. /usr/bin/gcc is symlinked with llvm-gcc. Any packages that need plain gcc will not work with the "command-line-tools-for-xcode.dmg" install. We'll have to keep using something like OSX-GCC-Installer (https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer) for now.

Anyway, this is a positive move for those of us who want to be able to use Xcode and also need/want a normal gcc installation on the same machine.

I've had a LOT of good experience using clang instead of GCC for compiling a lot of different packages that say they require GCC. Honestly it is no surprise that Apple has stopped shipping an extremely outdated GCC and that they are not including a newer version of GCC due to the GPL v3.

Clang is better at compiling things than LLVM-GCC. It's the default in Homebrew with Xcode 4.3 and is only getting better. It seems to compile most things fine and what it doesn't we will actively try and fix if you file a bug.

It looks like Apple worked with Kenneth Reitz (the guy who created that OSX-GCC-Installer on github) and it seems that the Command Line Tools for Xcode download from Apple is a result of that conversation. It also looks as if homebrew is going to support compilation using the official package from Apple. Read more: http://kennethreitz.com/xcode-gcc-and-homebrew.html

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