Agreed, I think the writing was on the wall for CodeWarrior from the day OS X came out.
Apple was vendor-neutral regarding development tools for the entire classic Mac era: yes they sold MPW, but Universal Interfaces, SDKs, documentation were all distributed separately. It was a level playing field for Apple, Lightspeed/Symantec, Metrowerks, and even Microsoft to compete and sell development environments (IDE, compiler, libraries).
But of course this all changed with OS X. The entire Mach-O world was just not intended to be targeted by anyone else's environment (each CodeWarrior release from that era is basically tied to a specific OS X version for Mach-O development because of header/library changes between versions). Objective-C was Apple's language, being evolved without any standards body. Cocoa was a fantastic framework, taking away much of the need for PowerPlant. And unlike the 68k->PPC transition, Apple didn't give tools vendors a heads-up on the PPC->Intel transition.
Although I miss Metrowerks and a competitive market, I think it's outweighed greatly by the benefits of having the best dev tools be free, something that was unheard of 15 years ago. I sometimes wonder if the software landscape on the classic Mac would have been different if the best dev environment (THINK C, later CodeWarrior) had been free.
(although Metrowerks put a lot of effort here too: I remember CodeWarriorU, and also the Discover Programming Edition which was a full-featured 68k CodeWarrior + extra documentation for $100)
> Apple didn't give tools vendors a heads-up on the PPC->Intel transition.
In ~2005, were any of the third-party Mac dev tools vendors in a position to make good use of the heads-up? Who was good enough at staying current in the late PPC days that they could have spared resources to bring up an x86 toolchain as well?
Metrowerks/Code Warrior had an x86 compiler in the late 90s. CodeWarrior was the BeOS PPC compiler and it was also used for the x86 R3 release (1998). For R4, they switched to GCC 2.9 (and from PE to ELF) because it generated better code (perhaps there were financial and other considerations as well).
Be paid Cygnus for the gcc port, shortly before red hat bought up Cygnus.
Apple was vendor-neutral regarding development tools for the entire classic Mac era: yes they sold MPW, but Universal Interfaces, SDKs, documentation were all distributed separately. It was a level playing field for Apple, Lightspeed/Symantec, Metrowerks, and even Microsoft to compete and sell development environments (IDE, compiler, libraries).
But of course this all changed with OS X. The entire Mach-O world was just not intended to be targeted by anyone else's environment (each CodeWarrior release from that era is basically tied to a specific OS X version for Mach-O development because of header/library changes between versions). Objective-C was Apple's language, being evolved without any standards body. Cocoa was a fantastic framework, taking away much of the need for PowerPlant. And unlike the 68k->PPC transition, Apple didn't give tools vendors a heads-up on the PPC->Intel transition.
Although I miss Metrowerks and a competitive market, I think it's outweighed greatly by the benefits of having the best dev tools be free, something that was unheard of 15 years ago. I sometimes wonder if the software landscape on the classic Mac would have been different if the best dev environment (THINK C, later CodeWarrior) had been free. (although Metrowerks put a lot of effort here too: I remember CodeWarriorU, and also the Discover Programming Edition which was a full-featured 68k CodeWarrior + extra documentation for $100)