Release 4 Development Tools

What development tools will ship with R4?
Release 4 of the BeOS will ship with the full developer tools for each platform. The PowerPC release will include the unlimited tools from Metrowerks, and Intel will ship with EGCS. Both releases should ship with PackageBuilder.

How does this affect the Developer Program?
The levels of the Developer Program vary mainly in the technical and evangelical support provided, rather than the availability of tools. Only the Be Enthusiast level currently does not include the full toolset, as it depends on the individuals to acquire the software they need. With R4, when a Be Enthusiast acquires the BeOS, the developer will acquire the full development tools as well.

What about CodeWarrior?
The BeIDE is being updated to work with the EGCS tools, and will ship with R4. On PowerPC the Metrowerks source-level debugger will also ship on the BeOS CD. There will be no independent release of the CodeWarrior tools in the future, as the full tools are provided with the BeOS itself.

What about an Intel source-level debugger?
We continue to have engineering resources working full-time on a GUI source-level debugger for Intel, but it is unlikely to be finished by the time R4 gets into the hands of developers. However, we hope to have a BeOS version of gdb, the GNU command-line source-level debugger, up and running soon. It should be available when R4 ships, although it might not make the R4 CD.

When will we get the new tools?
Developers will not receive the unlimited tools for either platform until they get R4. The EGCS tools are ELF-based and are of no use without R4, and on PowerPC the tools will not become free until R4.

Will there be any cross-compilation tools?
No. CodeWarrior v1.5 provided some experimental cross-compilation tools allowing a developer to compile applications for the opposite platform of the BeOS (ie compile Intel apps on PowerPC and vice versa). These unsupported tools will no longer be available. Developers wishing to produce applications for a flavor of the BeOS will need access to a machine of the appropriate platform.

Where can I find the source for the EGCS tools?
As EGCS falls under the GNU Public License, the source code must be made freely available. The source code for EGCS, along with the other GPL components of the BeOS, will be made available from the Be ftp site. Be will also release a CD, the Be Developer Extras Pack, that will include all of this source code.

What about current CodeWarrior owners?
Many current owners of CodeWarrior are owed an additional release of the tools from their original purchase agreement. As the tools are now included on the BeOS CD proper, these CodeWarrior owners will get the entire OS instead of a separate CW disk.

How well do the new tools perform?
There are two sides to this question. We have seen, in general, a nice increase in run-time performance of applications compiled with the new tools. Actual figures can be seen on the Performance page.

The other side is the performance of the tools themselves. The EGCS tools do compile more slowly than the Metrowerks tools. This is partially due to the increased optimization, but is also due to the fact that the program simply runs slower. It also seems to have a slightly larger memory requirement. Both of these changes are not unreasonable, even when building the entire BeOS tree.