"My friend recently got a Mac, and unbeknown to himself was forced to download a 2.something GB download for the developer pack just so he could get GCC, Now I

"My friend recently got a Mac, and unbeknown to himself was forced to download a 2.something GB download for the developer pack just so he could get GCC, Now I know there are better ways to achieve this, but this to me seems counter productive." Development on Macs is certainly not without problems. I think Apples philosophy is to provide the whole package to assure there is not problem because of missing parts. Being a Mac developer is also not free anymore. XCode 4 is the first version of the development tools that costs money. Nothing compared to Visual Studio of course, but the direction is not so great. I usually ignore all these tools and use Netbeans or bbedit and commandline tools. I can afford that because I build scientific software in java and don't have to deal with Apples packages.