Whereas Clang is a compiler toolchain that supports C, C++, and Objective-C natively.Ĭommand-line developer tools install gcc. GCC is a group of compilers that supports C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, and D.Whereas, Clang is developed to provide better performance than GCC. GCC is another compiler like Clang developed to compile different programming languages.

GCC(GNU Compiler Collection) is a compiler for various programming languages like C, C++, and Objective-C developed by GNU.įollowing are some of the differences between GCC and Clang: Using GCC compiler in the Terminal window For example, clang test.c creates a.out as executable.If no output file name is used, a.out is used as an output file.The code to compile would become clang test.c -o test.

Let us say the code is written in the test.c file, and the output executable should be test.

clang -o can be used to compile a C code.

InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin

Command-line tools install various compilers like Clang and GCC, which will be explained in the next sections.Īpple clang version 13.0.

Once Xcode is installed, open a terminal window and enter Xcode-select -install, which installs command line developer tools.

Xcode can be installed via App Store on Mac.

Xcode is an IDE(Integrated Development Environment) developed by Apple.

In the following sections, we will discuss different C compilers that can be used on MAC. IDE can be anything like Sublime text, Xcode, etc. Getting started on compilingįor compiling C code on Mac, we would need an IDE(Integrated Development Environment) which can be used to write code, and a compiler to compile the written code. The executable created for one platform can only be executed on that platform. C compilers compile C code and create an executable according to the platform. That is the reason for the size difference.Ĭ code can be written on any platform like Mac, Windows, etc. Whereas the size of the executable on Mac is 49 KB !!! Can you guess why there is a difference in size between C code and executable? The compiler takes care of loading stdio.h code and all the required code that is needed to run into an executable. Can you guess the size of the above C code and the executable it generates?Ĭ code only took 71 bytes to be stored.

Mac C compilers convert a C code to an executable that can be run directly.

Macbook c compiler