Codatory

A year ago in October I took my first full-time real no kidding development position. I was finally going to get to use Rails every day. I’d never really been a fan of all those Mac loving Rubyists, but I figured it worked fine on Linux so I’d be OK.

Well, I don’t have a lot of tolerance for frustration, so after a few months of struggling to learn Linux and Ruby at the same time, and trying to find a decent editor for Linux that I liked I ended up buying a MacBook Pro so I could “just use Textmate.” I wanted my tools to be out of my way and everyone was telling me that the Mac was the way to do it. I RVM’d it up and installed a Textmate trial. Of course, I also had to install XCode so that I could get a working GCC and homebrew to get some other dev tools.

Textmate, it turned out, was too slow and clunky for me. I traded it in for MacVim + Janus for a long while, ran RubyMine for a while, tried emacs a few times and am currently using SublimeText 2. I didn’t find what I was looking for in an editor completely, but being on the Mac made trying many different editors an easy task.

Everything was going pretty well, with the occasional hiccup until I started really pushing my system. I started running into issues with memory management (inactive memory, ahem) bringing my system to a grinding halt right at a critical moment. I’ve got an SSD in my computer, but moving large files takes hours because of TimeMachine and Spotlight.

It seems that one of the biggest features of OSX is designed to sell newer hardware. Which frankly sucks. Not only do you have to pay a huge premium for Apple hardware to run OSX, but then critical components of the operating system prevent you from being able to take advantage of that overpriced but pretty piece of equipment you bought.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is Lion. Or more specifically XCode 4. Or even more specifically this:

% which gcc
/usr/bin/gcc
% gcc --version
i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2335.15.00)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

If you look closely, you should notice that GCC is in fact, not GCC. /usr/bin/gcc on Lion is actually the busted and unmaintained llvm-gcc. The amount of things that won’t compile against that is staggering, and I can’t really put the blame on the developers but it sure makes compiling new gems, rubies and updates to things from Homebrew a hassle.

It really just makes me want to go back to Linux. The high level stuff may have lacked polish (though I didn’t look everywhere I could’ve), but at least the stupid compilers work. And I’ve yet to run into a Linux distro where /usr/bin/gcc wasn’t GCC.