PureBasic Forums - English

Hypothesis: It is possible to create programs in PB with Xcode.

There seems to be a hint of how this might be possible at http://maxao.free.fr/xcode-plugin-interface/. What do you think?

Yeah, this would be fine, but I think we can not expect development of PB4 programs in XCode (incl. Interface Builder), but this could be a way to get the PB application universal binary.
Objective-Basic did it in a similar way. It uses Interface Builder and compiler technologies from XCode, but it uses its own code editor.

Well XCode is only an IDE, the compiler behind it is a version of GCC (The GNU Compiler Collection), PB uses GCCs assembler(as) and linker(ld) already and this linker can build universal binaries just fine but you need to supply it with both x86 .o files and ppc .o files. x86 isn't that hard because Fred only needs to do a recompile of the Linux version of the compiler to get them, but in order to do the ppc .o files he will need to work the new features like doubles into the ppc code. Since this code is newer than the x86 code for the 3.94 version on Win/Lin, I hope he can do this without the hassle we had with these features on x86.
Using other tools of the GNU chain than the linker and assembler wouldn't be practical though since PB is in itself a compiler and not a basic top C translator.

Xcode is extensively configurable. You are not bound to using GCC as the compiler if your language doesn't have a GCC front end.
If need be, the entire build process can be customized, including the compile phase. However, a lot of this configurability is undocumented and not officially supported by Apple, which is why it has been figured out largely by reverse engineering.

So, indeed as mike74 hypothesizes, there's no reason why the PB compiler can't be fully integrated into the Xcode IDE.

I didn't say it were imppossible but I say it will help nothing in he Universal Binary problem