Macintosh Developer Pain

Posted by Eric Tue, 24 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

I'm in maze of twisty little library interfaces, all different. I'm dealing with three C libraries (MPW StdCLib, CarbonStdCLib.o and MSL), two MacOS platforms (PPC and Carbon), two build systems (MPW and CodeWarrior) and a growing sense of desperation. Of course, no piece of this cruft wants to talk to any other piece.

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Things I Hate About CodeWarrior, Part I

Posted by Eric Fri, 20 Sep 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Metrowerks CodeWarrior is a fairly nice compiler suite and IDE for the Macintosh. Unfortunately, it suffers from several severe flaws. Most of these flaws involve CodeWarrior's binary project files.

A short list of problems with this design:

  1. The project files are completely opaque. As Unix users like to complain, binary files are just an opaque blob of bytes. This breaks such vital utilities as diff and merge.
  2. The project files change every time you compile your program. For some unknown reason, CodeWarrior stores object code in the project files. This means the files get changed every time you compile. This makes CVS grumpy.
  3. The project file format is always changing. I've never upgraded CodeWarrior without having to re-import all my project files.
  4. CodeWarrior can't read very old project files at all. Just today, CodeWarrior told me it couldn't open an old project file at all. I wonder what was in there.

Now, don't get me wrong, CodeWarrior was a really sweet product back in early 1995. But by modern standards, it's pretty painful.

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