But, as I mentioned above, students who are taking their first programming class and own a Mac will also find this discussion useful - indeed mandatory. They’ve come from a Linux or other UNIX platform, like IBM’s AIX, and they just want to carry on their research in Eclipse on a Mac. But many researchers and scientists aren’t interested in Xcode. To be perfectly clear, Apple’s Xcode is a fabulous development system for C, C++, Objective-C and even Fortran 77***. (Clearly, I’m speaking to an older crowd here.**) Things are moving far too fast nowadays not to make this important move. So if you’re a scientist, researcher or engineer who wants to write some research code, not intended as a GUI app, in Java, C, C++ or Fortran, you need to dump vi as an editor* (or Emacs or Nedit or whatever) immediately and get with this kind of IDE.

Time is money, and efficiency reflects on you as a programmer.

Print statements in your code are oh, so yesteryear with a tool like this. That last item, the debugger, can’t be emphasized enough. That’s the power of an IDE with a modern debugger.

He finished his, typically, in 30 minutes. It was taking them four, six, or even 20 hours in some cases to complete their homework each week. However, later, he came back and commented that the other students were trying to manage ever increasingly complex projects with the vi editor. She taught him how to use Eclipse on a Mac, even though he resisted at first. Here’s how to get gcc without installing Apple’s Xcode and then install Eclipse for C/C++ programming.Īt work recently, my wife was chatting with a colleague who was taking his first C++ class. Composing a serious chunk of code with vi is no longer acceptable,* so users in this frame of mind are now using Eclipse, a modern IDE, that’s also free. Apple’s Xcode development system is superb for developing applications, but sometimes you just want to write C or C++ code for research or school.

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