Why isn't there Xcode for Windows?

user_241654 0
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Why can't Xcode be hacked to be able to run on Windows? Does Xcode have another programming methods?

Also, I heard that iPhone apps are made with Objective-C, so why is this not available in Windows?

Thanks

xcode macos objective-c
6 Answers

Xcode is written in Objective-C and takes advantage of a number of OS X frameworks, so porting it to Windows would require porting all the frameworks on which Xcode relies. Furthermore, Xcode also uses a number of programming tools that would have to be ported to Windows as well (some of them already are, of course).

There are several reasons that Objective-C isn't readily available on Windows:

  1. Most development of Objective-C frameworks takes place on OS X, and a lot of the frameworks aren't open-source and thus can't be ported to Windows (they'd have to be rewritten).
  2. There are some open-source frameworks that could be used on Windows -- for example, OS X's AppKit and Foundation frameworks are (mostly) available as part of the GNUstep project -- but these frameworks aren't widely used or supported on Windows, and sometimes lack capabilities found in their OS X counterparts.

That said, GCC is available on Windows, and since GCC is an Objective-C compiler, you could compile Objective-C code on Windows if you had the right libraries available (or didn't use any third-party libraries). But Objective-C isn't terribly useful without supporting frameworks, and those are rare or nonexistent on Windows.

user_288040

Same can be said why isn't there Visual Studio 2008 for OSX.

Yada_450660

Xcode is a big application written to set of APIs not present on Windows. Porting it would be an enormous job, maintaining it would be a big job, and there are already popular IDEs on the Windows platform.

user_25090

The same reason you can't install Mac OS X on your PC: Apple chooses to make it available only to people who own their own brand of computers.

user_2486460
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