"Apple had about 2.06 percent of the US desktop market in 2003. By 2010, OS X had about 10.9% of the market," writes Github developer Holman. "There's a slew of reasons for this growth, but I think a large part of it is the migration of software developers from Windows to OS X starting in the early 2000's. Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines."
But there's always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that's compiler support. In order to get /a>, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn't a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it's a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.
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Holman writes:
If I want to release a great new Ruby gem that uses a C extension or library, I need to ask prospective users of that gem to:
Spend $4.99 in the App Store
Download a large 4.5GB file
Spend a decent amount of time installing XCode
Sacrifice 15GB of disk space to an app they likely won't use
Install my gem
What do you think? Is it really a cumbersome process? After all, as pointed out by several commenters on Hacker News, it's a process that only needs to be completed once for each machine you work on (unless you reload the OS). And $5 doesn't seem like much compared to the overall cost of a machine (and Xcode 3 is still free). But Holman isn't asking for much: just a stand-alone gcc package, either from Apple or a third-party. If you want gcc for Windows, you can download W for free and it's only 576.1MB. It seems to come down to the principle of the thing, more than the actual inconvenience.
Is OSX becoming less developer friendly?
uss