Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarycrusader | Hacker News Reader

  You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get
  a bunch of command line development tools?

That hasn't been true since earlier this year. If you login to developer.apple.com, you can download the "Command Line Tools for XCode" from here:

  https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action

No "lame" IDE required. But you might think that IDE is not so lame the first time you use Instruments...

View on HN

To add to that: I think XCode is the most powerfull IDE I've ever used when it comes to coding c/c++/objective-c.

I have a macbook air and have some projects where I write cross platform C and C++ libraries (Linux/OS X/Windows via mingw), currently using Makefiles and a text editor. I use and like IDEs when programming python, C++ on Windows and javascript and certainly wouldn't mind a powerful C IDE. Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power? Also can XCode work nicely with Makefiles or do I have to buy into a special platform specific build system (again a problem with the whole cross platform thing)?

"Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power?"

I'm also very interested to get the answer of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com