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As someone who also used to really dislike Objective-C and also likes C#, I would urge you to reconsider your opinion about Objective-C. It's really not a bad l

As someone who also used to really dislike Objective-C and also likes C#, I would urge you to reconsider your opinion about Objective-C. It's really not a bad language. It makes different trade-offs than C#, but I think once you understand the "philosophy" behind the language, chances are that you will discover that it's actually a pretty good tool for certain tasks (at least this has happened to me). I agree however that the current state of debugging Objective-C code is simply atrocious. I really hope that Xcode will address that soon.

jbrennan 15y ago
As someone who spends most of their time in Xcode doing Objective-C work, I find the debugger to be particularly delightful. Between the gdb/lldb shell, mouse-over displays, variables view, "automatically run in the debugger when I set breakpoints without needing to be in a special Debug mode", the Static Analyzer, and Instruments, I find it to be a treat. What do you find atrocious about it? Perhaps it's something I'm missing as I haven't used Visual Studio's debugger in forever (or Eclipse, or Qt Creator)..
- DrJokepu 15y ago
  I have no complaints about the static analyzer and Instruments; they're both excellent tools. The debugger is stuck in the 80's, it's essentially GDB with a very light GUI rigged on the top of it. It doesn't allow for things like easy exploration of data structures; the complaint by the OP is very legit, you shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to see what's going on in an NSArray. The very fact that NSLog is so common in Objective-C code (and not used for error logging purposes but for debugging purposes) is indicating that it is very difficult get any useful information out of the Xcode debugger. Not to mention the lack of advanced features such as Visual Studio's historical debugger that can be very very helpful.

jbrennan 15y ago

As someone who spends most of their time in Xcode doing Objective-C work, I find the debugger to be particularly delightful. Between the gdb/lldb shell, mouse-over displays, variables view, "automatically run in the debugger when I set breakpoints without needing to be in a special Debug mode", the Static Analyzer, and Instruments, I find it to be a treat. What do you find atrocious about it? Perhaps it's something I'm missing as I haven't used Visual Studio's debugger in forever (or Eclipse, or Qt Creator)..

DrJokepu 15y ago
I have no complaints about the static analyzer and Instruments; they're both excellent tools. The debugger is stuck in the 80's, it's essentially GDB with a very light GUI rigged on the top of it. It doesn't allow for things like easy exploration of data structures; the complaint by the OP is very legit, you shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to see what's going on in an NSArray. The very fact that NSLog is so common in Objective-C code (and not used for error logging purposes but for debugging purposes) is indicating that it is very difficult get any useful information out of the Xcode debugger. Not to mention the lack of advanced features such as Visual Studio's historical debugger that can be very very helpful.