OS X is indeed a rather nasty Unix platform right now because Apple in the midst of a long drawn out transition away from GCC. They are shipping a completely outdated GCC and an obsolete libstdc++, yet most libraries are still compiled with that ancient libstdc++.

I tried to use LLVM's libc++ instead but I had to recompile so many libraries and make sure the dynamic linker actually picks them up that it was just too big of a hassle. I don't see light at the end of that tunnel right now.

I'm thinking of giving Linux another try as a development platform.