GCC without Xcode on OS X

Question

I've just unwrapped my new MacBook Pro (yay!) and am now setting it up properly for development. Since I want to avoid clutter, I'm wondering if I really need to install the Xcode tools at all (I never use the IDE or Mac specific tools), since I'll install a newer version of GCC anyway, using MacPorts.

So, is there any benefit in installing Xcode? Is it necessary? What kind of set-up does it do behind the scenes? Basically: can I skip this or will it come back to haunt me because some Unix development tools just assume that OS X is always set up in this way?

Answer 1

We primarily use the Xcode IDE for building Cocoa/Carbon applications. Xcode typically has different project templates (and project settings fixed accordingly). As long as you are not going to generate a Universal Binary or a framework I think you should be ok. As far as I am concerned, when I am too pissed with Xcode, I go back to the command line, set up the paths myself and start using GDB.

Answer 2

I tried this trick and I was constantly chasing missing header files and such. Just install XCode.

Answer 3

First of all, congratulations on the new MBP. I recently bought a 15" unibody myself. =)

You can safely skip Xcode installation, and you can install almost everything Xcode installs through MacPorts, except Xcode itself, of course.

However, I believe you'll find yourself installing Xcode one day anyway, and installing Xcode is much easier than installing all the tools (especially GCC) through MacPorts.

Answer 4

In order to perform an easy and successful install of MacPorts, already having tools from the xCode installer is necessary. You only need the install option that places a copy of the unix/header files outside of xcode; everything else can remain uninstalled.

Answer 5

You can strip down the Xcode install quite a lot - when you install Xcode there is a "Customise" button where you can remove a lot of stuff (gigabytes worth).

You can also go in and delete stuff from /Developer/, for example the 10.3 SDK is about 150MB (I think), and if you're not writing software for that it's quite safe to delete. Obviously be careful when deleting, but if you break things, you can always reinstall the Developer Tools!

Answer 6

Recently I got the question of how to install a bare minimum for development, from a teacher. What he needs is a minimal install, enough for using GCC but not much more. The students won't even use GCC, but another compiler that uses GCC for linking.

There are two demands: Minimum download time, and don't demand the students to sign up with Apple just for this.

Can this be solved in some elegant, student-friendly way? A shell script is OK.