Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

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>Apple releases their gcc package, installs it in Lion by default, or otherwise makes it available. This would be excellent. The holy grail would be if Homebrew could use this and we could just run brew install gcc. It would be a huge, huge impact to our community.

Or, you could JFGI[1]: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=apple+open+sourc...

Do people just not know about http://www.opensource.apple.com/ ? Apple's GCC source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/ go ahead, compile it. Add it to Brew. It's still under GPL. They even include instructions on how to compile it, flags, everything. There's a lot in those readmes / changelogs.

It seems that every time someone laments that Apple is oh-so-closed and has-no-source and etc, they merely don't know about opensource.apple.com. I've seen "how could they not release it, it's GPL!" complaints all over the internet, and they sometimes go for months without someone doing a search anywhere for "apple open source". Or in this case, "apple gcc source", where the first link gives the location to download the source right in the very first sentence: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Develo...

[1]: http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/

Assuming a just-bought vanilla Mac computer, how is someone supposed to install a tarball of GCC or LLVM/Clang sourcecode without a C compiler?

Keep in mind that OS X does not come with "make", "ld", "as", "nasm", "yasm", "gcc", "g++", "cc", "c++", or any others I may have missed.

I understand someone else could provide a pre-compiled package of GCC or Clang for the community, but that is not what the author is talking about in that point. He is specifically talking about end-users and developers of other languages besides C and Objective-C that may require installing packages that need to have native C extensions compiled. ruby-mysql comes to mind, as well as RVM, the Ruby Version Manager, becoming effectively useless without those Ruby developers being forced to buy Xcode, not for Xcode, but for GCC.

>I understand someone else could provide a pre-compiled package of GCC or Clang for the community, but that is not what the author is talking about in that point.

That's what "brew install gcc" would do, so yes, they are talking about that. Precisely that. And that it would be nice to have it installed by default (no argument there). The Homebrew scripts could easily download a GCC binary and set up PATH to use it, so all someone needs to do is compile it, host it, and create a script to do so.

The entire rant about OSX requiring XCode to have GCC is fundamentally incorrect. The rest is stating a preference - that they'd like GCC installed separately, on its own, with every install of OSX.

Assuming a just-bought vanilla Mac computer, how is someone supposed to install a tarball of GCC or LLVM/Clang sourcecode without a C compiler?

Take the developer DVD that came with your Mac, put it in the drive, and double-click the install icon?

Too-late-to-edit: here's LLVM too: http://llvm.org/releases/download.html#2.8

Courtesy of rayiner at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2311657

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