What is CodeWarrior Development Studio 9?

We believe Metrowerks when it claims that 90 percent of commercial Mac developers use CodeWarrior. Prior to the release of Mac OS X with its included Developer Tools, choices for casual Mac OS developers were limited. CodeWarrior’s target market is the big leagues—Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and so on. Are you in that group? We didn’t think so. But don’t fear CodeWarrior—some small developers, such as SlashMUD and MacMAME, use CodeWarrior, as does a fair share of the educational market due to the awesome student discount. CodeWarrior has a lot of things going for it other than sheer momentum. Its integrated development environment (IDE) is tightly wound. You can bypass the built-in editor for one that suits your fancy. You can use any text editor that supports certain Apple Events. BBEdit is the standard, but others—including SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra), Nisus Writer Express, and even Microsoft Word—work in a pinch. TextWrangler’s docs don’t mention CodeWarrior support, but it worked for us. XCode is supposed to work, but the street dirt says it doesn’t work all that well.

Depending on which version you buy, you can write software for OS X, Classic OS, and Windows. One caveat—don’t expect to write one set of APl code for both Windows and Mac OS. CodeWarrior supports MFC (but not NET) for writing Windows apps and PowerPlant, Carbon, Cocoa, plus Toolbox for Mac OS X and Classic. You can keep the Windows and Mac versions’ code together, but they don’t share the same code base. CodeWarrior supports C, C++, and Objective C, but not Java, though the academic learning edition does offer Java support. If you want to program for embedded systems or a handheld device, tough luck—those development tools only run on Windows, even though CodeWarrior started on the Mac.

CodeWarrior ships with decent online documentation in HTML and PDF format. Printed manuals cost a mint, so get used to reading online—and get ready to wait, as it takes a while for the table of contents to load. Fetch a cup of coffee while the search frame loads. Make a PB&J with the crusts cut off while the program actually searches. And choose your search terms wisely. Sometimes you get good resuits, sometimes you get wildly useless ones. We wish Metrowerks would add keywords to the docs’ HTML to give the search functions a bit more accuracy or at least some speed.

As far as new features go, this version makes small improvements to PowerPlant, the Mach-O (OS X only) linker, and the C and C++ standard libraries. These under-the-hood changes are supposed to result in faster build and compile times. CodeWarrior can also debug OS 9 apps remotely, so you can run and develop in OS X on one machine and debug the OS 9 version on a networked computer running OS 9. The other enhancements are primarily cosmetic tweaks. CodeWarrior added support for Objective-C in version 8; version 9 adds code completion in the internal editor. Packaging (exporting) the finished app is slightly easier, as the visual display is no longer hidden.

Tyler, Mark E. (March 2004). CodeWarrior Development Studio 9. MacAddict. (pg. 44).

Download CodeWarrior Development Studio 9 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU