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Xcode is trash and I’m very sad that JetBrains discounted AppCode. It made things bearable even if I still had to use Xcode for certain tasks. My biggest compl

Xcode is trash and I’m very sad that JetBrains discounted AppCode. It made things bearable even if I still had to use Xcode for certain tasks. My biggest complaint with Xcode is speed. It’s feels incredibly laggy to me. Auto-complete is slow and error reporting is insanely slow. I hope you like typing code and then 5-30 seconds later the IDE shows an error (normally a bad one). I’ve never had a good experience writing code in Xcode. Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on.

danuker 2y ago
Perhaps JetBrains should reconsider AppCode, since Xcode only got this crappy recently. Apparently they didn't get the market share they had hoped for. https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-release-and-end-of-sales-and-support/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...
- wruza 2y ago
  Xcode only got this crappy recently It gets exponentially more crappy every time, which creates an impression that it only got crappy recently. I remember it doing this since 2010. The usual counter is to stay on the same version until either of you is literally dead. Although I didn’t find AppCode more useful for my simple tasks. If anything, it felt android-ish in ux, if you know what I mean.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > It gets exponentially more crappy every time On which ratio scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_sca... ) do you define/measure "crappiness" so that you can say that "crappiness" grows exponentially? ;-)
- joshstrange 2y ago
  > since Xcode only got this crappy recently I've always felt like it was slow and annoying to use personally. At least coming from the IntelliJ world, maybe if you were only in Xcode it was pretty decent until recently.
  - bena 2y ago
    Same. Coming from Visual Studio, XCode always felt just kinda bad.
- dtech 2y ago
  They seem to be putting all of their eggs in the Kotlin multi-platform basket. Might also be why they discontinued it so those devs with iOS expertise could focus on that.
  - singularity2001 2y ago
    Kotlin which is a beautiful language unfortunately is killed by Gradle which is even worse than Xcode
    - bartekpacia 2y ago
      this might interest you: https://github.com/JetBrains/amper https://github.com/JetBrains/amper
- lucsky 2y ago
  > since Xcode only got this crappy recently Xcode has been slow, messy, buggy and all around atrocious to use since day one. Being forced to migrate from MPW and Code Warrior to this utter piece of garbage has actually pushed me to web development.
pjmlp 2y ago
Officially they never got enough sales out of it, that is why. So XCode isn't bad enough that developers would consider paying for better alternatives.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Xcode is a really hard one to replace because at the end of the day you pretty much have to use it at least a little bit so some developers will probably choose to use it just so they don't have to use two editors. I'm not aware of many/any other languages/platforms that are that locked down (at least in mainstream programming)
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Windows and game consoles. Yes, there are tons of stuff you can do on Windows without Visual Studio, but then you aren't doing all the scenarios a Windows developer might care about. There is also that little bit only available in a mix of Windows SDK and VS plugins.
tartuffe78 2y ago
PSA: Turning off the "Enable Source Control" feature has always been a must for me to get decent performance out of Xcode.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Interesting, I would/have never managed git from within Xcode so I'll be turning that off for sure.
- AHTERIX5000 2y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I'll need to try it out. Performance is really abysmal with C++ development and it's the biggest reason for avoiding Xcode for me. Actions such as completion and contextual jumping just keeps lagging on a M3 Pro even if everything should be indexed. VS Code with the usual C++ plugin and CLion have no problems with the same codebase. I like the integration with different sanitizers in Xcode, some of the visualizations are pretty neat. Instruments is quite good as well.
prmph 2y ago
The shittiness of XCode and just app development in general for iOS, combined the mess that is Android development, is why I just gave up on native app development. I'm now entirely focused on web development and won't invest any time or effort in keeping up with native app development. It's sad how the concept of native app leads to walled gardens, instead of the web being promoted and improved to be the primary way to deliver apps. And the web need serious and continual efforts to modernize its of development and use experience, but it is far superior model than native apps IMHO. Since America just won't do it, the EU should force Apple and Google to allow the experience of using mobile web apps to be on par with that of native apps. At the very least, allow a one click way to add a web app to the home screen easily.
- mamcx 2y ago
  And Android Studio is even worse (that is weird, the bare IDE is the same as others, but the android apis and tooling overshadow it). And the use of Gradle multiplied it by 1000.
- worble 2y ago
  > I'm now entirely focused on web development and won't invest any time or effort in keeping up with native app development. I can't agree with this more. After having numerous problems with native android development before, I decided to give flutter a go recently for a mobile app idea I've been wanting to do. After getting byzantine and seemingly unsolvable errors from flutter doctor and gradle for the 3rd time after completely reinstalling it every time, I just gave up and started making an app in tauri instead.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I love the web, I write cross platform mobile apps using web tech (same code as the website) that work 90%+ as well on web vs "native" (sometimes more, sometimes less depending on which features I need). The issue is even less-so with web capabilities (though I absolutely wish more was available) but with customers/client's expectations. I can spend all day telling someone "This website here does everything an app would" and they simply will not care until they see it in the App/Play Store. I've seen this happen over 10+ external companies that I've worked with. I'll provide a website with the "app" that they can play with and literally 99% of the time they won't even look at it until it's in app form. Same codebase, same UI, same features, it's insane but I've seen it happen enough times to expect it. I think it's partly a prestige thing but whatever the cause, I don't see myself getting away from dealing with Xcode/Android Studio/App Store Connect/Google Play Console. At least Android Studio is built on IntelliJ... and that's about the only nice thing I can say about it (other than thank god it's not eclipse based anymore).
cellularmitosis 2y ago
Are you using source-based dependencies? Have you tried Carthage instead?
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
It's remarkably unintutive for tasks that should be even trivial (like splitting an editor pane). Getting acclimated in a basic fashion takes far longer than it should given my experience with every other modern IDE.
robenkleene 2y ago
> Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on. "Sane hotkeys" and "my plugins" are subjective (and suggest that you probably don't use Xcode as your primary editor). And Xcode has had multiple cursors since Xcode 10 in 2018 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode... The reason AppCode died is that Apple platform engineers on the whole are very happy with Xcode. Source: I worked as an Apple platforms engineer for a decade across many teams and the person who complained about Xcode the most was always me, and overall I also think it was usually pretty good, arguably great. That is until they added Swift, which always had performance and stability issues (many of the complaints in this thread are fair for Swift support in Xcode). It still worked quite well for me for the C family of languages though (I haven't used Xcode seriously in a couple of years now). If your going to give your opinion on Xcode, it's a good idea to give a count for years that you've worked in the program. For an IDE I personally wouldn't bother with anyone's opinion that hasn't put at least 1000 hours in the program, and a lot of the comments in this thread sound like people who just opened the program for a one-off task and formed their opinion based on that. My colleagues for years have been people who live in Xcode, eight hours a day, five days a week, and I've never heard opinions like this thread expressed by them (except for the Swift support).
- tayistay 2y ago
  Ok well you asked. I've been using Xcode for 15 years now professionally. I have two CS degrees and one of my apps was featured on the Mac App Store front page. So, basically, I know wtf I'm talking about. I detest Xcode. The latest horrible thing it has done to me is decide to ignore various important Build Settings, throwing them under User-Defined. Doesn't say way. Just pure magic bullshit. It crashes occasionally, but that doesn't bother me that much. You just laugh at how bad it is and restart it. Sometimes you'll get some code-signing errors and you just reboot. I kid you not. You reboot and they go away. Xcode's connection to Xcode Cloud is pretty flakey too. Quite often it will fail to log in. You just restart Xcode and it goes away. Xcode will display errors that are out of date all the time. I've gotten so good at knowing which errors are just BS that I'm kinda proud of myself. Previews are useless. They could be so great but as soon as you break one, the debugging experience is so bad, you just give up. Sometimes your project will fail to build with them and the reasons are so opaque you just give up. The xcodeproj file format is merge hell. It's so telling that tools like Xcodegen exist. The new LLM-based code completion thing is mostly just amusing. Definitely not ready for prime time. There's clearly no CI on the template projects because if you archive the Audio Unit one, the swift compiler crashes currently. Wheee! Nobody uses the git integration on Xcode AFAICT. It runs faster if you just turn it off. The GPU debugger is quite a crashy mess, though it has gotten better. Still you will not be able to debug your shaders and you'll have no idea why. The GPU debugger doesn't work if you put any MSL code inside a Swift package too. I used to have an icky work around for that, then just gave up on modularizing my project to the extent I would like to. I experienced the issue mentioned in the article: couldn't add local packages by dragging them in. But somewhere along the line it went away. Don't know why, and I don't have the time to dig into it. I really should compile a proper list. I'm sure I can think of more, especially if I go through the list of bugs I've filed over the years. Anyway, now you've heard this opinion expressed by an experienced person. Consider it a data point.

danuker 2y ago

Perhaps JetBrains should reconsider AppCode, since Xcode only got this crappy recently. Apparently they didn't get the market share they had hoped for. https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-release-and-end-of-sales-and-support/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...

wruza 2y ago
Xcode only got this crappy recently It gets exponentially more crappy every time, which creates an impression that it only got crappy recently. I remember it doing this since 2010. The usual counter is to stay on the same version until either of you is literally dead. Although I didn’t find AppCode more useful for my simple tasks. If anything, it felt android-ish in ux, if you know what I mean.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > It gets exponentially more crappy every time On which ratio scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_sca... ) do you define/measure "crappiness" so that you can say that "crappiness" grows exponentially? ;-)
joshstrange 2y ago
> since Xcode only got this crappy recently I've always felt like it was slow and annoying to use personally. At least coming from the IntelliJ world, maybe if you were only in Xcode it was pretty decent until recently.
- bena 2y ago
  Same. Coming from Visual Studio, XCode always felt just kinda bad.
dtech 2y ago
They seem to be putting all of their eggs in the Kotlin multi-platform basket. Might also be why they discontinued it so those devs with iOS expertise could focus on that.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  Kotlin which is a beautiful language unfortunately is killed by Gradle which is even worse than Xcode
  - bartekpacia 2y ago
    this might interest you: https://github.com/JetBrains/amper https://github.com/JetBrains/amper
lucsky 2y ago
> since Xcode only got this crappy recently Xcode has been slow, messy, buggy and all around atrocious to use since day one. Being forced to migrate from MPW and Code Warrior to this utter piece of garbage has actually pushed me to web development.

pjmlp 2y ago

Officially they never got enough sales out of it, that is why. So XCode isn't bad enough that developers would consider paying for better alternatives.

joshstrange 2y ago
Xcode is a really hard one to replace because at the end of the day you pretty much have to use it at least a little bit so some developers will probably choose to use it just so they don't have to use two editors. I'm not aware of many/any other languages/platforms that are that locked down (at least in mainstream programming)
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Windows and game consoles. Yes, there are tons of stuff you can do on Windows without Visual Studio, but then you aren't doing all the scenarios a Windows developer might care about. There is also that little bit only available in a mix of Windows SDK and VS plugins.

tartuffe78 2y ago

PSA: Turning off the "Enable Source Control" feature has always been a must for me to get decent performance out of Xcode.

joshstrange 2y ago
Interesting, I would/have never managed git from within Xcode so I'll be turning that off for sure.
AHTERIX5000 2y ago
Thanks for the tip, I'll need to try it out. Performance is really abysmal with C++ development and it's the biggest reason for avoiding Xcode for me. Actions such as completion and contextual jumping just keeps lagging on a M3 Pro even if everything should be indexed. VS Code with the usual C++ plugin and CLion have no problems with the same codebase. I like the integration with different sanitizers in Xcode, some of the visualizations are pretty neat. Instruments is quite good as well.

prmph 2y ago

The shittiness of XCode and just app development in general for iOS, combined the mess that is Android development, is why I just gave up on native app development. I'm now entirely focused on web development and won't invest any time or effort in keeping up with native app development. It's sad how the concept of native app leads to walled gardens, instead of the web being promoted and improved to be the primary way to deliver apps. And the web need serious and continual efforts to modernize its of development and use experience, but it is far superior model than native apps IMHO. Since America just won't do it, the EU should force Apple and Google to allow the experience of using mobile web apps to be on par with that of native apps. At the very least, allow a one click way to add a web app to the home screen easily.

mamcx 2y ago
And Android Studio is even worse (that is weird, the bare IDE is the same as others, but the android apis and tooling overshadow it). And the use of Gradle multiplied it by 1000.
worble 2y ago
> I'm now entirely focused on web development and won't invest any time or effort in keeping up with native app development. I can't agree with this more. After having numerous problems with native android development before, I decided to give flutter a go recently for a mobile app idea I've been wanting to do. After getting byzantine and seemingly unsolvable errors from flutter doctor and gradle for the 3rd time after completely reinstalling it every time, I just gave up and started making an app in tauri instead.
joshstrange 2y ago
I love the web, I write cross platform mobile apps using web tech (same code as the website) that work 90%+ as well on web vs "native" (sometimes more, sometimes less depending on which features I need). The issue is even less-so with web capabilities (though I absolutely wish more was available) but with customers/client's expectations. I can spend all day telling someone "This website here does everything an app would" and they simply will not care until they see it in the App/Play Store. I've seen this happen over 10+ external companies that I've worked with. I'll provide a website with the "app" that they can play with and literally 99% of the time they won't even look at it until it's in app form. Same codebase, same UI, same features, it's insane but I've seen it happen enough times to expect it. I think it's partly a prestige thing but whatever the cause, I don't see myself getting away from dealing with Xcode/Android Studio/App Store Connect/Google Play Console. At least Android Studio is built on IntelliJ... and that's about the only nice thing I can say about it (other than thank god it's not eclipse based anymore).

cellularmitosis 2y ago

Are you using source-based dependencies? Have you tried Carthage instead?

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

It's remarkably unintutive for tasks that should be even trivial (like splitting an editor pane). Getting acclimated in a basic fashion takes far longer than it should given my experience with every other modern IDE.

robenkleene 2y ago

> Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on. "Sane hotkeys" and "my plugins" are subjective (and suggest that you probably don't use Xcode as your primary editor). And Xcode has had multiple cursors since Xcode 10 in 2018 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode... The reason AppCode died is that Apple platform engineers on the whole are very happy with Xcode. Source: I worked as an Apple platforms engineer for a decade across many teams and the person who complained about Xcode the most was always me, and overall I also think it was usually pretty good, arguably great. That is until they added Swift, which always had performance and stability issues (many of the complaints in this thread are fair for Swift support in Xcode). It still worked quite well for me for the C family of languages though (I haven't used Xcode seriously in a couple of years now). If your going to give your opinion on Xcode, it's a good idea to give a count for years that you've worked in the program. For an IDE I personally wouldn't bother with anyone's opinion that hasn't put at least 1000 hours in the program, and a lot of the comments in this thread sound like people who just opened the program for a one-off task and formed their opinion based on that. My colleagues for years have been people who live in Xcode, eight hours a day, five days a week, and I've never heard opinions like this thread expressed by them (except for the Swift support).

tayistay 2y ago
Ok well you asked. I've been using Xcode for 15 years now professionally. I have two CS degrees and one of my apps was featured on the Mac App Store front page. So, basically, I know wtf I'm talking about. I detest Xcode. The latest horrible thing it has done to me is decide to ignore various important Build Settings, throwing them under User-Defined. Doesn't say way. Just pure magic bullshit. It crashes occasionally, but that doesn't bother me that much. You just laugh at how bad it is and restart it. Sometimes you'll get some code-signing errors and you just reboot. I kid you not. You reboot and they go away. Xcode's connection to Xcode Cloud is pretty flakey too. Quite often it will fail to log in. You just restart Xcode and it goes away. Xcode will display errors that are out of date all the time. I've gotten so good at knowing which errors are just BS that I'm kinda proud of myself. Previews are useless. They could be so great but as soon as you break one, the debugging experience is so bad, you just give up. Sometimes your project will fail to build with them and the reasons are so opaque you just give up. The xcodeproj file format is merge hell. It's so telling that tools like Xcodegen exist. The new LLM-based code completion thing is mostly just amusing. Definitely not ready for prime time. There's clearly no CI on the template projects because if you archive the Audio Unit one, the swift compiler crashes currently. Wheee! Nobody uses the git integration on Xcode AFAICT. It runs faster if you just turn it off. The GPU debugger is quite a crashy mess, though it has gotten better. Still you will not be able to debug your shaders and you'll have no idea why. The GPU debugger doesn't work if you put any MSL code inside a Swift package too. I used to have an icky work around for that, then just gave up on modularizing my project to the extent I would like to. I experienced the issue mentioned in the article: couldn't add local packages by dragging them in. But somewhere along the line it went away. Don't know why, and I don't have the time to dig into it. I really should compile a proper list. I'm sure I can think of more, especially if I go through the list of bugs I've filed over the years. Anyway, now you've heard this opinion expressed by an experienced person. Consider it a data point.