IBM beta compilers for Mac OS X released

28 Aug 2003

I spotted this on the mac arch. IBM have done a beta release of their C/C++ compilers for Mac OS X. This compiler will produce optimised G5 code, obviously, as well as support for any PowerPC processor. GCC is known to be a bit lagging in terms of performance for any architecture that isn’t ix86, so hopefully this will provide some additional performance for apps, especially on the new G5s. I can’t help but notice that there’s no Objective C support, though that’s not especially surprising, as the IBM compilers seem to be a port of IBM’s Visual Age compilers, and Objective C is an Apple quirk, though I happen to quite like it. The IBM tools are meant to produce GCC compatible object files though, so some mixing and matching should be possible, which would be a suitable comprimise.

Link: http://www-3.ibm.com/software/awdtools/ccompilers/