Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!bskendig
From: bskendig@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: What C compiler for the MAC
Message-ID: <13155@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 22 Jan 90 03:23:59 GMT
References: <333@cica.cica.indiana.edu>
Reply-To: bskendig@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig)
Organization: Systems Engineering, NASA Space Station Freedom Project
Lines: 56

In article <333@cica.cica.indiana.edu> ssw@cica.cica.indiana.edu (Steve Wallace) writes:
>What's a good C compiler for the MAC.  My past experience is with
>MS-DOS and Unix.  I the near future I'll be responsible for
>producing MAC applications.  I've started reading Inside the MAC;
>any other suggestions?

After sampling both MPW C and THINK's Lightspeed C, I'd swear by the
latter.

MPW C is immensely powerful - it's what Apple people themselves use to
program their applications.  It is text-oriented, and has a
command-line interface very similar to Unix.  Its primary benefit, in
my opinion, is that it is fully endorsed by Apple (of course), and so
is *the* standard, and all of Apple's released code is written to
compile without modifications on MPW.  MPW is only a shell; you can
then buy Pascal, C, Fortran, MacApp, or other compilers to run under
it.  In addition to generating application or resource code with the
compiler, you can also create MPW `tools' to perform tasks for you.

Lightspeed C is very powerful as well, but in my opinion is much
friendlier.  The `Makefile' present in Unix and in MPW C is here
turned into a `project' file that contains a list of all the source
files in your project (not the files themselves) and their object code
(thus eliminating the need for .o files).  This is all displayed in a
project window; double-clicking on one of the filenames listed will
open that source file.  It has an incredible graphic run-time debugger
(much like a Mac-ified version of gdb, the Gnu debugger) and the
ability to test-run applications before actually linking together an
application file.  It can provide a Unix-like environment in which
unmodified Unix code can run, in a manner somewhat different from that
provided by MPW.

There is one majorMajorMAJOR caveat to buying MPW, however: I believe
that you must join APDA (the Apple Programmers and Developers
Association) in order to purchase it.  Its price is steep (wasn't it
something like $300?), and the membership fee for APDA is similarly
steep.  Lightspeed C, on the other hand, can be gotten for $220 at
most, and as little as $140 through a school discount (how I got my
copy).

As a final word of advice, take a peek at all the code in Sumex, and
all that comes through comp.sys.mac.binaries.  I'd bet that most of it
is Lightspeed C code.

     << Brian >>

Disclaimer: I have no relation with either Apple or Symantec.  Neither
do I have price lists or feature lists in front of me, so if you take
this article as etched in stone, you may eventually find that your
karma has run over my dogma.

-- 
| Brian S. Kendig      \ Macintosh |   Engineering,   | bskendig             |
| Computer Engineering |\ Thought  |  USS Enterprise  | @phoenix.Princeton.EDU
| Princeton University |_\ Police  | -= NCC-1701-D =- | @PUCC.BITNET         |
|   Systems Engineering, NASA Space Station Freedom / General Electric WP3   |