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Xcode unironically made me try to change career from iOS developer to pen tester. I've spent way too much time in its guts and I think its left a little bit of

by _mlxl 5y ago

Xcode unironically made me try to change career from iOS developer to pen tester. I've spent way too much time in its guts and I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad. And Apple keep bolting stuff on to it (and the new stuff doesn't work - Canvas for SwiftUI previews for example). It's slow, broken in numerous ways, depends on file formats that aren't used anywhere outside of Apple and completely undocumented. It is such a painful tool to use.

OnlyMortal 5y ago
I’m with you. The original applications of Project Builder, Interface Builder and TextEdit were better because they were focused. Feature creep is never a good thing. It’d have been better to build tools for Swift in its own right, allowing those tools to integrate - probably by using distributed objects. But, it isn’t that way so such is life.
- azinman2 5y ago
  I strongly disagree. I don’t want to have to open multiple tools when it should all interoperate together for the same effective high-level task. Unifying it all just allows for better (hypothetical) integration between all the parts. Just remember — integration doesn’t mean it has to be bad or slow (current Xcode can always be improved).
  - adrusi 5y ago
    Multiple tools doesn't mean that they can't interoperate. It's just that Apple (and everyone else) has given up on graphical IPC.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      What’s a graphical IPC? How would processes communicate graphically?
      - adrusi 5y ago
        More precise would be to say "graphical IPC control" or "graphical IPC initiation." I'm trying to point to the ability for users in a graphical environment to coordinate intricate communication between processes. Copy/paste and drag-n-drop are canonical examples, but I'd say that macOS tools like Alfred should also count.
      - nexuist 5y ago
        Not OP but my layman's understanding is that it would just be two GUI windows communicating over standard IPC. The current trend is for the entire application to be represented as a singular window, using navigation or tab controllers to switch between views rather than popping them out into their own windows.
        adrusi 5y ago
        Better window management paradigms aren't quite what I was referring to, but would also be great for mainstream software vendors to not have given up on. I use the Sway compositor on my personal machines to get some sort of reasonable window management tooling, which is lovely to the limited extent that even Linux software embraces composability in graphical environments. Would be nice to have similar tools on my work macbook.
        karlmdavis 5y ago
        Check out Amethyst for Mac OS. It’s a bit buggy, and it’s not Sway, but it’s Sway-like enough for me to get by on my work system.
        adrusi 5y ago
        With my particular workflow, tiling functionality without window-manager-level tabs is not enough of an improvement over the window snapping I can get with BetterTouchTool to justify another tool, but I am quite pleased with the availability of good third party window management tools on macOS. I understand that many people find tiling on its own quite useful (and my reliance on tabs restricts me quite a bit on Linux as well — to Sway, i3 and the ancient Notion). Windows has at least one tool for tabbed windows though! Check out Stardock Groupy if that sounds like your sort of thing (and I swear there was another one but I can't find it, maybe Groupy is a rebrand?)
    - nexuist 5y ago
      +1 for the term "graphical IPC." It is a huge pet peeve of mine that native apps choose to push new views onto navigation controllers instead of just opening a new window. They're looking to invent browsing history when there shouldn't be any (and if you need browsing history - use a browser!).
      - adrusi 5y ago
        Ah, but if you open a new window, then users will have too many windows open and get confused or frustrated! You would need some kind of innovation in window management beyond the 1990s for that to be feasible. But desktop OS vendors seem to still be operating under the paradigm of making their desktop environments as approachable by computer novices as possible. Maybe still a good business decision, but the future for desktop OSs is clearly with professionals and enthusiasts, and it's my hope more advanced human/computer interface approaches will follow. You can have better window management facilities on Linux, but you have to choose between software that copies the mainstream paradigm of, as you say, pushing new views onto navigation controllers (and I'd add using tabs/split-panes built into the window itself instead of being offloaded to a more sophisticated window manager), or software that's quite rough around the edges.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    > Just remember — integration doesn’t mean it has to be bad or slow (current Xcode can always be improved). How is VS Code so popular, if its big brother Visual Studio can do everything it does and more? Doesn't this signal that the market prefers lightweight IDEs over heavier ones? Me personally, I would love to have a text editor on the left and the iOS simulator on the right and that's all you need to ship. Xcode Playgrounds attempted to execute this shift, but they still need much more attention until they can function as well as the regular workflow does (which is sad, 'cause the regular workflow sucks).
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      > How is VS Code so popular, if its big brother Visual Studio can do everything it does and more? I only know extremely few people who'd use VS Code for C++, so "popular" is really ecosystem-dependent
      - BearOso 5y ago
        I use it. VS Code+clangd intellisense makes it easy to enumerate available classes, functions, and members, and because you don’t have to remember excessively verbose objects, writing self-documenting C++ is simple. Plus, you get automatic syntax checking as you go. That you can get these in a less-than-IDE nowadays is wonderful.
    - plorkyeran 5y ago
      Visual Studio does not do a superset of what VS Code does. There's the very obvious difference in that VS is Windows-only while VSC is not (there is a Visual Studio for Mac, but it's a third unrelated program and not a Mac version of Visual Studio). Even if you are running Windows, VSC has more functionality than VS for non-C/C++/.NET development.
yashap 5y ago
I’m a primarily backend dev who works on mobile apps sometimes, and I strongly agree. It’s a truly terrible and frustrating piece of software. It tries to do way too many things, and does them all poorly. Even doing something as simple as upgrading Xcode via the App Store is painful, often progressing insanely slowly and taking hours or even tens of hours on an otherwise fast connection. It has been like this for years and years and Apple has done nothing to fix it, like most Xcode issues.
- domano 5y ago
  And they tax the CPU pretty hard too.
  - MobileVet 5y ago
    This, so much this. I have a fully loaded MBP 16” w/ i9, 32GB RAM and the fan starts very quickly due to indexing and whatever else it is doing.
    - josephg 5y ago
      I have a 2016 MacBook Pro which has gradually become completely useless for swift development in Xcode. The computer sometimes randomly reindexes while I type, which can lag Xcode so much that it drops keystrokes. And as a result if I’m not watching closely, sometimes method names will come out garbled. To reiterate, Xcode makes my $3000 computer from a few years ago so slow that I can’t type the name of a function. A few months ago I moved to a ryzen development machine running Linux mint to code rust using IntelliJ. Responsiveness and stability is night and day. It’s a shame, too - swift is a lovely language and I’d love to use it more. But life is too short to put up with Xcode.
      - MobileVet 5y ago
        Crazy right? $3.5k and it can’t handle indexing / compiling Swift?! Some other devs on the team just got M1s. They are backend though... so I haven’t seen an M1 running Xcode yet. Very curious but I am guessing it is night and day... for half the cost or less.
wsc981 5y ago
> Xcode unironically made me try to change career from iOS developer to pen tester. I've spent way too much time in its guts and I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad. I've been a mobile dev for many many years and most of my time was spent focused on iOS. I didn't find Xcode that bad, but sometimes annoying issues do keep popping up, for example stuff related to provisioning profiles. Last few years more of my time was spent with Xamarin and the macOS version of Visual Studio (rebranded Xamarin Studio) and it's quite a bit worse than Xcode. Xamarin Studio has the tendency to get really slow after extended usage and I pretty much never had such issues with Xcode. Few things are more frustrating to me (not to mention a huge productivity killer) than writing code in a slow, laggy editor. At least Xcode doesn't have that issue (most of the time). However, what I really like is to be able to just use a simple text editor for my work. Lately, as a hobby and for side-projects, I've been using Sublime Text with LÖVE 2D (Lua) and this has been really fun to me. No project files to deal with, no complicated UI stuff (visual editors and the like), no more downloading of gigabytes of simulators after an update (as long as I focus on macOS & Windows that is), etc... With MAUI, Microsoft will make the default Xamarin project structure also really simple, just a few lines of code. That should make it a lot easier to use a simple text editor for Xamarin dev work, instead of the slow Visual Studio for macOS IDE. Perhaps Apple should follow suit with Xcode.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  As another primarly-iOS developer I agree. Xcode was better back when Interface Builder was separate (that merge never should've happened) but as a whole I don't find Xcode any more irritating than I find Android Studio (which has found some truly unique ways to be frustrating). It will be interesting to see where things go in the coming years though, because between SwiftPM, SwiftUI, SourceKit, and the SourceKit LSP I think many of us may be shifting toward a workflow more centered around a light editor. A few days ago I was toying around with SourceKit LSP in Sublime Text 4 and it's surprisingly servicable - most of my projects have abandoned xibs/storyboards already so I could probably make that setup work if I put some time into getting Sublime's build system set up.
  - jamil7 5y ago
Cloudef 5y ago
It's pretty sad how bad both iOS and Android development ecosystems are. Xcode is crap, homebrew is crap, gradle is crap ... Basically all tools hate automation. SPM seems like thing that could make things better, but it's swift only. Also the build times are ridiculous. How I wish I could just run compiler on a text file and run the god damn program I wrote on the device I own, like on every other sane OS.
- nexuist 5y ago
  This is why the JavaScript people said screw the whole thing and worked on porting web-esque development to mobile rather than trying to learn how to develop native apps. The difference in developer velocity is obscene. The only close native competitor I can think of is Flutter, which ironically is severely hampered by having to interoperate with Xcode (the thing that takes the most time out of any other task is compiling a production build). Flutter uses Dart which almost reads like vanilla JavaScript, and instead of dealing with the native UIs they just used Skia[1] to draw pixel-perfect equivalents for each platform (as opposed to React Native, which attempts to use the actual UI components and make them available in JS). [1] https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/ https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Ironically for hobby projects I've been using react-native as well, because it really makes developing a app faster, even though it will be bloated as hell. It's funny how even flutter decided to go with "new language" route. I guess NIH is strong in Android and iOS ecosystems.. I miss maemo/meego ...
    - FlashBlaze 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on the bloated part? I created a simple HN clone in React Native (without expo) and after publishing to Play Store, the app size was under 10MB.
      - Cloudef 5y ago
smoldesu 5y ago
I would almost be compelled to use and develop for Apple products if Xcode wasn't so comedically bad.
fishywang 5y ago
My own Xcode horror story: It was the end of 2009. I was working for a small startup doing some Twitter clone. We decided that we want to provide an iPhone app, and since we already provided Twitter like API, the easiest way is to just fork an open source iOS Twitter app to replace all the API endpoints to ours. I was doing that, using Xcode. One day the compiler complained something like "unexpected `\`". Looking at the code in Xcode, I don't see any \ around the position compiler pointing to. After stared at the code for an hour, I finally decided to open that file in vim, and sure there's an \ added before a double quotation mark I believe, while in that context an escape is not needed (and doing that is wrong, thus the complaint from the compiler). So Xcode's editor, trying to be smart, auto escaped a double quotation mark at the wrong place, and don't show it in the editor at all. Their compiler caught the error.
cageface 5y ago
My base stress level improved tremendously when I gave up iOS development and went back to the web. I don't have to deal with frustratingly broken tools every day or hold my breath every time I publish an update in case some random app store reviewer is having a bad day. Never again.
wlesieutre 5y ago
> Canvas for SwiftUI previews for example Automatic preview updating paused [Resume]

by _mlxl 5y ago

OnlyMortal 5y ago

I’m with you. The original applications of Project Builder, Interface Builder and TextEdit were better because they were focused. Feature creep is never a good thing. It’d have been better to build tools for Swift in its own right, allowing those tools to integrate - probably by using distributed objects. But, it isn’t that way so such is life.

azinman2 5y ago
I strongly disagree. I don’t want to have to open multiple tools when it should all interoperate together for the same effective high-level task. Unifying it all just allows for better (hypothetical) integration between all the parts. Just remember — integration doesn’t mean it has to be bad or slow (current Xcode can always be improved).
- adrusi 5y ago
  Multiple tools doesn't mean that they can't interoperate. It's just that Apple (and everyone else) has given up on graphical IPC.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    What’s a graphical IPC? How would processes communicate graphically?
    - adrusi 5y ago
      More precise would be to say "graphical IPC control" or "graphical IPC initiation." I'm trying to point to the ability for users in a graphical environment to coordinate intricate communication between processes. Copy/paste and drag-n-drop are canonical examples, but I'd say that macOS tools like Alfred should also count.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Not OP but my layman's understanding is that it would just be two GUI windows communicating over standard IPC. The current trend is for the entire application to be represented as a singular window, using navigation or tab controllers to switch between views rather than popping them out into their own windows.
      - adrusi 5y ago
        Better window management paradigms aren't quite what I was referring to, but would also be great for mainstream software vendors to not have given up on. I use the Sway compositor on my personal machines to get some sort of reasonable window management tooling, which is lovely to the limited extent that even Linux software embraces composability in graphical environments. Would be nice to have similar tools on my work macbook.
        karlmdavis 5y ago
        Check out Amethyst for Mac OS. It’s a bit buggy, and it’s not Sway, but it’s Sway-like enough for me to get by on my work system.
        adrusi 5y ago
        With my particular workflow, tiling functionality without window-manager-level tabs is not enough of an improvement over the window snapping I can get with BetterTouchTool to justify another tool, but I am quite pleased with the availability of good third party window management tools on macOS. I understand that many people find tiling on its own quite useful (and my reliance on tabs restricts me quite a bit on Linux as well — to Sway, i3 and the ancient Notion). Windows has at least one tool for tabbed windows though! Check out Stardock Groupy if that sounds like your sort of thing (and I swear there was another one but I can't find it, maybe Groupy is a rebrand?)
  - nexuist 5y ago
    +1 for the term "graphical IPC." It is a huge pet peeve of mine that native apps choose to push new views onto navigation controllers instead of just opening a new window. They're looking to invent browsing history when there shouldn't be any (and if you need browsing history - use a browser!).
    - adrusi 5y ago
      Ah, but if you open a new window, then users will have too many windows open and get confused or frustrated! You would need some kind of innovation in window management beyond the 1990s for that to be feasible. But desktop OS vendors seem to still be operating under the paradigm of making their desktop environments as approachable by computer novices as possible. Maybe still a good business decision, but the future for desktop OSs is clearly with professionals and enthusiasts, and it's my hope more advanced human/computer interface approaches will follow. You can have better window management facilities on Linux, but you have to choose between software that copies the mainstream paradigm of, as you say, pushing new views onto navigation controllers (and I'd add using tabs/split-panes built into the window itself instead of being offloaded to a more sophisticated window manager), or software that's quite rough around the edges.
- nexuist 5y ago
  > Just remember — integration doesn’t mean it has to be bad or slow (current Xcode can always be improved). How is VS Code so popular, if its big brother Visual Studio can do everything it does and more? Doesn't this signal that the market prefers lightweight IDEs over heavier ones? Me personally, I would love to have a text editor on the left and the iOS simulator on the right and that's all you need to ship. Xcode Playgrounds attempted to execute this shift, but they still need much more attention until they can function as well as the regular workflow does (which is sad, 'cause the regular workflow sucks).
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > How is VS Code so popular, if its big brother Visual Studio can do everything it does and more? I only know extremely few people who'd use VS Code for C++, so "popular" is really ecosystem-dependent
    - BearOso 5y ago
      I use it. VS Code+clangd intellisense makes it easy to enumerate available classes, functions, and members, and because you don’t have to remember excessively verbose objects, writing self-documenting C++ is simple. Plus, you get automatic syntax checking as you go. That you can get these in a less-than-IDE nowadays is wonderful.
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Visual Studio does not do a superset of what VS Code does. There's the very obvious difference in that VS is Windows-only while VSC is not (there is a Visual Studio for Mac, but it's a third unrelated program and not a Mac version of Visual Studio). Even if you are running Windows, VSC has more functionality than VS for non-C/C++/.NET development.

yashap 5y ago

I’m a primarily backend dev who works on mobile apps sometimes, and I strongly agree. It’s a truly terrible and frustrating piece of software. It tries to do way too many things, and does them all poorly. Even doing something as simple as upgrading Xcode via the App Store is painful, often progressing insanely slowly and taking hours or even tens of hours on an otherwise fast connection. It has been like this for years and years and Apple has done nothing to fix it, like most Xcode issues.

domano 5y ago
And they tax the CPU pretty hard too.
- MobileVet 5y ago
  This, so much this. I have a fully loaded MBP 16” w/ i9, 32GB RAM and the fan starts very quickly due to indexing and whatever else it is doing.
  - josephg 5y ago
    I have a 2016 MacBook Pro which has gradually become completely useless for swift development in Xcode. The computer sometimes randomly reindexes while I type, which can lag Xcode so much that it drops keystrokes. And as a result if I’m not watching closely, sometimes method names will come out garbled. To reiterate, Xcode makes my $3000 computer from a few years ago so slow that I can’t type the name of a function. A few months ago I moved to a ryzen development machine running Linux mint to code rust using IntelliJ. Responsiveness and stability is night and day. It’s a shame, too - swift is a lovely language and I’d love to use it more. But life is too short to put up with Xcode.
    - MobileVet 5y ago
      Crazy right? $3.5k and it can’t handle indexing / compiling Swift?! Some other devs on the team just got M1s. They are backend though... so I haven’t seen an M1 running Xcode yet. Very curious but I am guessing it is night and day... for half the cost or less.

wsc981 5y ago

> Xcode unironically made me try to change career from iOS developer to pen tester. I've spent way too much time in its guts and I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad. I've been a mobile dev for many many years and most of my time was spent focused on iOS. I didn't find Xcode that bad, but sometimes annoying issues do keep popping up, for example stuff related to provisioning profiles. Last few years more of my time was spent with Xamarin and the macOS version of Visual Studio (rebranded Xamarin Studio) and it's quite a bit worse than Xcode. Xamarin Studio has the tendency to get really slow after extended usage and I pretty much never had such issues with Xcode. Few things are more frustrating to me (not to mention a huge productivity killer) than writing code in a slow, laggy editor. At least Xcode doesn't have that issue (most of the time). However, what I really like is to be able to just use a simple text editor for my work. Lately, as a hobby and for side-projects, I've been using Sublime Text with LÖVE 2D (Lua) and this has been really fun to me. No project files to deal with, no complicated UI stuff (visual editors and the like), no more downloading of gigabytes of simulators after an update (as long as I focus on macOS & Windows that is), etc... With MAUI, Microsoft will make the default Xamarin project structure also really simple, just a few lines of code. That should make it a lot easier to use a simple text editor for Xamarin dev work, instead of the slow Visual Studio for macOS IDE. Perhaps Apple should follow suit with Xcode.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
As another primarly-iOS developer I agree. Xcode was better back when Interface Builder was separate (that merge never should've happened) but as a whole I don't find Xcode any more irritating than I find Android Studio (which has found some truly unique ways to be frustrating). It will be interesting to see where things go in the coming years though, because between SwiftPM, SwiftUI, SourceKit, and the SourceKit LSP I think many of us may be shifting toward a workflow more centered around a light editor. A few days ago I was toying around with SourceKit LSP in Sublime Text 4 and it's surprisingly servicable - most of my projects have abandoned xibs/storyboards already so I could probably make that setup work if I put some time into getting Sublime's build system set up.
- jamil7 5y ago

Cloudef 5y ago

It's pretty sad how bad both iOS and Android development ecosystems are. Xcode is crap, homebrew is crap, gradle is crap ... Basically all tools hate automation. SPM seems like thing that could make things better, but it's swift only. Also the build times are ridiculous. How I wish I could just run compiler on a text file and run the god damn program I wrote on the device I own, like on every other sane OS.

nexuist 5y ago
This is why the JavaScript people said screw the whole thing and worked on porting web-esque development to mobile rather than trying to learn how to develop native apps. The difference in developer velocity is obscene. The only close native competitor I can think of is Flutter, which ironically is severely hampered by having to interoperate with Xcode (the thing that takes the most time out of any other task is compiling a production build). Flutter uses Dart which almost reads like vanilla JavaScript, and instead of dealing with the native UIs they just used Skia[1] to draw pixel-perfect equivalents for each platform (as opposed to React Native, which attempts to use the actual UI components and make them available in JS). [1] https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/ https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/
- Cloudef 5y ago
  Ironically for hobby projects I've been using react-native as well, because it really makes developing a app faster, even though it will be bloated as hell. It's funny how even flutter decided to go with "new language" route. I guess NIH is strong in Android and iOS ecosystems.. I miss maemo/meego ...
  - FlashBlaze 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on the bloated part? I created a simple HN clone in React Native (without expo) and after publishing to Play Store, the app size was under 10MB.
    - Cloudef 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago

I would almost be compelled to use and develop for Apple products if Xcode wasn't so comedically bad.

fishywang 5y ago

My own Xcode horror story: It was the end of 2009. I was working for a small startup doing some Twitter clone. We decided that we want to provide an iPhone app, and since we already provided Twitter like API, the easiest way is to just fork an open source iOS Twitter app to replace all the API endpoints to ours. I was doing that, using Xcode. One day the compiler complained something like "unexpected `\`". Looking at the code in Xcode, I don't see any \ around the position compiler pointing to. After stared at the code for an hour, I finally decided to open that file in vim, and sure there's an \ added before a double quotation mark I believe, while in that context an escape is not needed (and doing that is wrong, thus the complaint from the compiler). So Xcode's editor, trying to be smart, auto escaped a double quotation mark at the wrong place, and don't show it in the editor at all. Their compiler caught the error.

cageface 5y ago

My base stress level improved tremendously when I gave up iOS development and went back to the web. I don't have to deal with frustratingly broken tools every day or hold my breath every time I publish an update in case some random app store reviewer is having a bad day. Never again.

wlesieutre 5y ago

> Canvas for SwiftUI previews for example Automatic preview updating paused [Resume]