# C Programming on a Mac



## kensimmer (Sep 12, 2006)

I was thinking about learning how to program C but I'm not sure if you can on a Mac. If you can does anyone know if there are any good free compilers for Mac.


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## g/re/p (Sep 12, 2006)

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/programming.html



> Programming Languages
> Compilers and Libraries
> Apple provides a customized/optimized GNU CC, with backends for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++. For Java, two compilers are included: javac and IBM's jikes. Compilers for many other languages are available either precompiled (such as the XL Fortran Advanced Compiler from IBM), or can be compiled from source, which is not any harder in general than compiling the same source on, say, Linux or FreeBSD. The same goes for development libraries - it should be easy to compile many open source platform-independent / multi-platform libraries from source on OS X. Many important libraries and APIs are either included with Mac OS X, or are readily available (Gtk/Gtk++, Java, OpenGL, Qt, QuickTime, Tcl/Tk, X11R6). The system comes with several special purpose (and/or optimized) libraries as well, such as for Numerical Computing and Image processing (BLAS, vBigNum, vDSP, vImage, LAPACK, vMathLib, etc.)


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## Viro (Sep 12, 2006)

Yes, you can. The developer tools that you can download or install via the system discs, include all you need to start programming in C, C++, Objective-C and Java. For other esoteric languages like Scheme, Prolog, Matlab, etc.  you can download fink which will install them for you.


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## kensimmer (Sep 12, 2006)

Thanks for the info.


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