23 October 2012

Mac OS X and Simultaneous Multi Platform Runtime Compiling

With the help of the lightweight cross platform GL windowing library GLFW and the Simple File Watcher, we've added Mac OS X support to Runtime Compiled C++. As an added benefit, you can now run multiple platforms from a shared directory, using one of them to code on the fly. Turn around times on Mac OS X with XCode 4 and Clang++ are excellent, better than windows on a similar system.


RCC++ on OS X and Windows 7 simultaneously
Mac OS X 10.8 with XCode 4 running the SimpleTest example natively top right along with a Windows 7 Parallels Desktop Coherence mode version of the example running bottom right. The apps in each OS have just compiled changes made from XCode. Turn-around times are significantly faster when not running the VM.

For the moment you'll need OS X 10.8 and XCode 4 to run the code on the Mac (we've not tested with OS X 10.7 but it might work). If you change the debugger to GDB the exception handling mechanism doesn't work as smoothly as with the default LLDB debugger, since GDB doesn't pass the exception signal on to the app.

We'll have more information on the port, the changes and our plans for the future soon.

Please do give us your feedback on the OS X version, as we've had limited ability to test this on other systems as yet.