Why isn't there Xcode for Windows?
macos, objective-c, xcode
Solution
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:
- 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).
- 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.
Problem
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