Why there isn't xcode for windows?

Question

Hi,

i don't know why xcode cannot be hacked and become running on windows? is xcode has another programming method?

also, i heared that iphone apps are made with objective c, so why this is not available in windows?

Thanks

Answer 1

Same can be said why isn't there Visual Studio 2008 for OSX.

Answer 2

Mainly for marketing purposes I think. If you could make apps on a PC why would you need a Mac?

Now that Mac's run on Intel, there are hacks out there. You can use things like Mono, but you still need a Mac.

Answer 3

The same reason you can't install Mac OS X on your PC: Apple chooses to make it available only to people who own their own brand of computers.

Answer 4

The "important" bits of Xcode are all available in MinGW.

Answer 5

XCode is a big application written to set of APIs not present on Windows. Porting it would be an enormous job, maintaining it would be a big job, and there are already popular IDEs on the Windows platform.

Answer 6

Xcode is written in Objective-C and takes advantage of a number of OS X frameworks, so porting it to Windows would require porting all the frameworks on which Xcode relies. Furthermore, Xcode also uses a number of programming tools that would have to be ported to Windows as well (some of them already are, of course).

There are several reasons that Objective-C isn't readily available on Windows:

1. Most development of Objective-C frameworks takes place on OS X, and a lot of the frameworks aren't open-source and thus can't be ported to Windows (they'd have to be rewritten).
2. There are some open-source frameworks that could be used on Windows -- for example, OS X's AppKit and Foundation frameworks are (mostly) available as part of the GNUstep project -- but these frameworks aren't widely used or supported on Windows, and sometimes lack capabilities found in their OS X counterparts.

That said, GCC is available on Windows, and since GCC is an Objective-C compiler, you could compile Objective-C code on Windows if you had the right libraries available (or didn't use any third-party libraries). But Objective-C isn't terribly useful without supporting frameworks, and those are rare or nonexistent on Windows.

Answer 7

it is just called Visual Studio on Windows :-)

Answer 8

I guess that porting XCode would be close to very hard (if not impossible) but even if you were able to have a running XCode version under Windows, I guess that it won’t do what you really want it to do. I assume you want a complete iPhone SDK environment which is reliant on XCode and Interface Builder in a very tight way. That’d require the port of Cocoa Frameworks (among other things) that would be, now for real, impossible to port.

Truth is, as much as you will surely need Windows for Windows Phone development, you need a Macintosh computer for iPhone development.

On the other hand, Xcode as an IDE, is not the best in the world, so even if you managed to get Xcode and make it use, .NET (for example), I’d much rather use visual studio for that.