Apple Previews Xcode 2

At todayis Worldwide Developeris Conference, Apple previewed Xcode 2, the update to its next generation suite of OS X application development tools. The release brings 64-bit development tools, an integrated reference library, and more. From the Apple press release:

Apple today previewed the next major release of Xcode, Apple?s powerful suite of developer tools, designed to make it even easier and faster to build innovative Mac OS X applications. The combination of a high performance UNIX-based development environment, a breakthrough user interface and outstanding performance technologies, has allowed Mac developers including Oracle, Sybase and Alias to deliver next generation Mac OS X applications. With the preview of Xcode 2, Apple is delivering a major update with support for 64-bit application development and even faster turnaround times for creating applications for Mac OS X.

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Xcode 2 also includes:

  • 64-bit development tools to build data-intensive applications using 64-bit memory addressing;
  • an integrated Apple Reference Library to offer a single search and presentation interface to all of Apple?s online and locally stored developer documentation;
  • Apple?s enhanced version of GCC v3.5, the next generation of the industry-standard compiler;
  • graphical remote debugging to display the debugging of data for full screen applications on remote machines;
  • Auto Vectorization to automatically generate Velocity Engine-optimized code without requiring any source code changes;
  • Ant build system support to make cross-platform development of Java applications even easier; and
  • support for Subversion Source Code Management, in addition to supporting CVS and Perforce, to enable easy integration with a wide range of development infrastructure.

Xcode 2 will be include with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", the next major version of OS X, which will be available in the first half of 2005.