

2011 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment - bradly
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/8700977975/2011-rubyists-guide-to-a-mac-os-x-development

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stephencelis
Having a standalone GCC installer is a nice option (especially if you have an
Air with limited disk space), but if you want to avoid the hassle of debugging
the occasional compilation failure, Xcode is the way to go.

~~~
RobertLowe
Just a note about GCC/XCode on Lion (esp. if using homebrew):

The default GCC installed by Xcode is no longer GCC you expect it too be, it's
actually a hybrid of LLVM and GCC

/usr/bin/gcc --version i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1

A non-hybrid version in installed at:

/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 --version i686-apple-darwin11-gcc-4.2.1 (GCC) 4.2.1

It's a rather important change to GCC on mac, it even broke `brew install
mysql` for awhile:

<https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/6277>

Some great hackers found out it was linking to Apple's internal pthread
library.

Code-softly hackers.

~~~
theatrus2
It also breaks building GCC due to an LLVM issue (it gives a nice internal
compiler error). It's fixed in LLVM upstream, but nothing Apple ships yet.

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smhinsey
Does anyone know of a site that collects these sorts of stories? I was
recently looking to set up an environment to start experimenting with a new
language and I have the ability to do it on ubuntu, os x, or windows 7, but I
had trouble finding advice on the tradeoffs of them, beyond the stereotypical
"use linux!" type stuff.

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chrismealy
Any word on homebrew installing gcc?

~~~
beaumartinez
There's always Kenneth Reitz' GCC-without-XCode installer[1].

[1] <https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer>

~~~
starwed
Man, I was looking for something like that just a few weeks ago, and somehow
completely failed to find it.

The exact phrase I sued was "install GCC without XCode", which turns up, not
the project, but a bunch of stackoverflow questions asking whether such a
thing is possible. Most of the answers are pessimistic or involve copying it
from installation CDs that didn't come with my Air.

The first result _now_ has the correct answer, but said answer is but a few
days old! :)

Thanks!

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chico_dusty
Just too bad 2011 OS X is hurting even more than ever for a competent
programmers editor. TextMate is dying by inches and it never really had the
powers of the Unix ones anyway. As for BBedit, it's pretty much a HTML editor
with syntax highlighting for some other things. You might as well use
Dashcode.

Yeah, Emacs blah Vim bleh, but those are not really OS X editors. I do be
using Emacs, but I crave real Mac-iness and integration.

~~~
nzoschke
Sublime Text 2 is hot. It's already gotten some Lion updates like Lion scroll
bars and full screen support.

It's cross platform (Windows, Linux and Mac), but still feels excellent on OS
X.

<http://www.sublimetext.com/2>

~~~
msluyter
I really like Sublime Text 2. My only complaint thus far is that in order to
change colors in themes -- in my case, I only change the comment color in
Monokai Bright from grey to green -- you have to find and manually edit the
config files. Which, honestly, is pretty easy. I like the fact that I can use
it both at work on Win7 and at home on my macs.

