Interface Builder was a standalone application for quite a long time. I don't clearly remember when it became built-in but I think it was around the time of Xc

Interface Builder was a standalone application for quite a long time. I don't clearly remember when it became built-in but I think it was around the time of Xcode 5, but it may have been Xcode 4. It would be easy to find out by reading the release notes; Apple has the notes for each release on its developer site. I liked Interface Builder quite a lot more when it was a standalone application. In general, I like a lot of things a lot more when they are separate programs. A gripe I have about Xcode is that I don't readily see a way to have text editing-only windows, and then some other window where I have the project settings. That's how CodeWarrior worked. While Xcode does strictly speaking permit you to open separate text windows, it doesn't really work when you do that. Finally, Apple has never documented any way to add plugins to Xcode. I expect one could reverse-engineer it however that method would not be supported by Apple, and so likely would break in new releases. There is quite a lot of Classic Mac OS code written in Pascal. I see no reason whatsoever that that Pascal couldn't be ported into OS X. There are lots of people who do just that - but they don't do it with Xcode. Even Apple has tons of Pascal code. Pascal code that would be useful on OS X, that would save Apple a lot of money, make life easy for everyone, increase AAPL shareholder value, but no, Steve Jobs for some reason didn't want Pascal on OS X. I really don't have a clue as to why. Consider that while in principle C strings can be of arbitrary length, it is uncommon for them to be very long. To find the length of a C string you have to count all the characters until you find the NUL terminator. To find the length of a Pascal string you just look at the first byte. While that limits the length to 255 characters, that's completely cool with the vast majority of uses of strings of any sort. If you wanted a string-like object of arbitrary length you could define some other type such as a BigString that had a size_t then a character array with no terminator. I don't really know but assertively conjecture that nothing other than converting all your C strings to Pascal strings would make your C/C++/Objective-C programs significantly faster, possibly smaller as well. Consider that strlen takes up the space of pushing the string pointer than calling the function, whereas finding the length of a Pascal string only involves addressing the first byte of an array.