Assembly language / Visual Studio for Mac?

[NorCalAthlete]

Apparently Eclipse with a C/C++ plug in will not suffice according to my professor. I'm not buying a PC laptop just for a single course, and my MacBook tends to crash frequently when attempting to run Parallels. Any other options? I'm told Xcode will do the trick but hell if I know how to use it (just downloaded it last night, completely unfamiliar with it).

The course is called Intro to Computer Systems and we're covering assembly language at the moment. Thanks guys.

[ocabj]

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Out of curiosity, what assembly book are you using for that course?

EDITED: I just re-read the Xcode part. Are you saying that the instructor said Xcode is acceptable? Then just use that. Visual Studio is essentially an IDE, same as Xcode. If not, the just run a Windows VM in virtualbox for your development environment for the course.

[NorCalAthlete]

No, the instructor is insisting on visual studio while a friend who's been through the course with a different instructor said he used Xcode.

VMs and parallels tend to crash my MacBook - it's an old 2008 model. I'll post the book up in a bit I'm on my phone at the moment

[ocabj]

Then in that case run virtualbox. Forget Parallels.

[woods]

I agree virtualbox is better.

Macs are not built to be developer friendly or power user friendly though and they are considerably slower and less secure than a home-built x86-64 PC.

Another idea is you may want to send a petition to the dean and to the administration asking that free and open source software be used. I went to college for programming and they ended up teaching me .net 2003 visual basic and access which was ultimately useless in the real world and only served to give them Microsoft kickbacks and bonuses... Oh and I forgot to mention IBM370 assembly that the teachers didn't even know.

I do real programming that matters and I use cross platform languages with cross platform tools.

Stay away from the JVM and Microsoft's .net or any other company who claims to own the entire API when languages themselves should be open and free to use.

If you get past your class and want to lean useful and open programming you can use:
1 Python with Kivy, Flask, SQLAlchemy, DJango
2 JavaScript/HTML5 with a number of open webapp creation libs
3 C/C++ in a number of free libraries like SDL, OpenGL, tons more
4 Lua
5 Ruby

All of those should run fine in Eclipse or KDevelop or a number of other free IDE's, editors, or debuggers.

In short I can build an app once on my PC using Linux and run a build job that spits out exe's for windows, bins for linux, apk's for android, and a ton of other platforms without legal problems or costly security flawed closed source suites and apis.

[ocabj]

Macs are not built to be developer friendly or power user friendly though and they are considerably slower and less secure than a home-built x86-64 PC.

OS X is an excellent platform for development. The reason why a lot of coders use OS X vs Linux is because of the OS X UI (vs XWindows) in combination with all the open source (GNU C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Java, Python, vagrant+vbox, git, etc) development tools available in Linux. All this, plus arguably the most stable platform in terms of OS and hardware integration.

Unless you're working as a developer in a specific Enterprise environment that mandates specific IDEs for custom in house development environments which don't operate in OS X, then this obviously means you'll use the alternative.

I understand if people want to use Linux instead of OS X for development because they hate Apple. I know people are dead set in their ways. But the fact is that Mac OS X is a viable development platform in our industry.

As far as what software a college chooses to teach in, while it can be frustrating to use MS IDEs, I don't think it should factor into learning. In all seriousness, the language(s) you are taught in Computer Science are just tools to learn. What you're really learning is algorithms and data structures, along with a lot of theory. A student is supposed to be able to pick up languages on their own time. We started off with C++ in Visual Studio, and quickly moved on to C++ in GNU/Linux, but then in our upper division courses we were pretty much given assignments in various languages including Java, lisp, Perl, but were expected to just learn it all on our own. Coding assignments are just practical application of your algorithms and pseudocode/logic, along with the practical application of the software engineering process.

[vikingm03]

My university had us do all our programming by sshing into a linux server (all students had our own accounts) and using emacs/nano/vim (whatever you prefer). At first I didn't like this, but looking back now and I wouldn't have it any other way. It really makes you a stronger programmer. Though I'm an embedded programmer now, which my school might have something to do with that!

[NorCalAthlete]

Clarified a bit - my professor specifically needs us to be using something capable of debugging in assembly.

[Cowboy T]

GDB has that capability. Here's the documentation from a Danish university that instructs their students to do just that.

http://www.akira.ruc.dk/~keld/teaching/CAN_e13/Readings/gdb.pdf

This is part of the GCC suite and should be available for your Mac OS.