[ic] Mac OSX viable as a development platform?

[John Young]

Regarding segmentation faults, perhaps you could find
more clues by tracing system calls.  I don't know what
the command, if there is one, would be on OS X, but in
Linux there's strace(1) and in Solaris there's truss(1).
If a tool like that is too verbose, you can either pipe
it through grep/egrep or exclude certain calls, for example
on Solaris:

truss -t \!poll,ioctl,brk,times,read,llseek interchange --serve

System call names can be gleaned from the output, or
possibly studied in the man pages (on Solaris: man -s 2 intro).


Also, don't be surprised about funny things with package,
OS, etc. upgrades.  I once had the memory faults on a SPARCstation.
Sun sent me replacement memory, a replacement motherboard -
still, no luck.  Turns out, I had installed an OS patch
for the audio - which in turn caused symptoms of a failed
SIMM or board.

Good luck.

-John Young