Xcode includes the GUI tool Instruments, which runs atop a dynamic tracing framework, DTrace, created by Sun Microsystems and released as part of OpenSolaris. Using the iOS SDK, tvOS SDK, and watchOS SDK, Xcode can also be used to compile and debug applications for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS. These helped ease the transitions from 32-bit PowerPC to 64-bit PowerPC, from PowerPC to Intel x86, from 32-bit to 64-bit Intel, and from x86 to Apple silicon by allowing developers to distribute a single application to users and letting the operating system automatically choose the appropriate architecture at runtime.

Xcode can build fat binary ( universal binary) files containing code for multiple architectures with the Mach-O executable format. Third parties have added support for GNU Pascal, Free Pascal, Ada, C#, Go, Perl, and D. Xcode supports source code for the programming languages: C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, AppleScript, Python, Ruby, ResEdit (Rez), and Swift, with a variety of programming models, including but not limited to Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. They can also be downloaded and installed without the GUI.

Xcode includes command-line tools which enable UNIX-style development via the Terminal app in macOS. Registered developers can download preview releases and prior versions of the suite through the Apple Developer website.

The software suite is offered free of charge. It was initially released in late 2003 the latest stable release is version 14.2, released on December 13, 2022, via the Mac App Store with macOS Monterey. Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. IDE including tools for developing software for Apple platformsġ4.2 (14C18) (December 13, 2022 3 months ago ( )) ġ4.3 beta 3 (14E5215g) (March 16, 2023 0 days ago ( ))

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