Snow Leopard: A Developer’s Delight
Snow Leopard, just like its predecessor Leopard, is a developer’s delight. It ships out of the box with (in no particular order):
- ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [universal-darwin10.0]
- Python 2.6.1
- perl, v5.10.0 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
- svn, version 1.6.2 (r37639)
- Apache/2.2.11
- PHP/5.3.0
- Java SE 6 (javac version 1.6.0_15)
- SQLite version 3.6.12
- gcc 4.2.1
And then you can also install XCode 3.2 or download the iPhone SDK.
I wish Apple also bundled MySQL/PostgreSQL.
Once you’ve installed XCode, you should also be able to compile a lot of open source software. I had an issue while compiling erlang where during the ./configure stage things would hang with the message:
checking for unreliable floating point execptions…
but it turns out that I was using an old R11 release, downloading the latest R13B01 release from erlang.org fixed that.
There is always MacPorts for those of us who don’t want to tinker with configurations, makefiles and such.
For those of us wanting to stay as close to our Linux production environment as possible, there is always the option of using a Linux virtual machine.