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I’ve been (very) casually dabbling with iOS and Mac development on and off since about 2011, and the one constant has been that Xcode is incredibly janky. My f

I’ve been (very) casually dabbling with iOS and Mac development on and off since about 2011, and the one constant has been that Xcode is incredibly janky. My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. Various versions would crash with alarming frequency. For years it was missing common text editing features like multiple cursors. Find and replace _still_ sucks, to this day. Since Swift came along, which I love as a language, type and error checking has become incredibly slow. A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. I’m doing Advent of Code in Swift this year and even for that—a couple dozen unconnected source files no more than 200 lines long each—I’ve had it refuse to rename files, breakpoints randomly stop working, Instruments refuse to let me edit configurations. Surely Apple’s own developers dogfood this all day every day and run into the exact same problems?

trinix912 2y ago
> My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. I had the exact same experience, and it was also a uni project :) Typing in Xcode also reminds me of VBA, where you'd only get the syntax highlighting for the line after completing it. Xcode regularly flashes it on-off for the entire file when typing. Quite an annoyance.
didgeoridoo 2y ago
> A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. This is MADDENING. I’ve had to comment out hundreds of lines of code across multiple files to get rid of error messages that were blocking Opt+click documentation from opening. This feels 100% inexcusable. (And if you do any SwiftUI development, get ready for a lot of “The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time” caused by a bog-standard parameter type mismatch. This is more excusable though, since SwiftUI seems to do unspeakably complicated things with generics and existentials so I could see things getting tangled up sometimes)

trinix912 2y ago

> My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. I had the exact same experience, and it was also a uni project :) Typing in Xcode also reminds me of VBA, where you'd only get the syntax highlighting for the line after completing it. Xcode regularly flashes it on-off for the entire file when typing. Quite an annoyance.

didgeoridoo 2y ago

> A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. This is MADDENING. I’ve had to comment out hundreds of lines of code across multiple files to get rid of error messages that were blocking Opt+click documentation from opening. This feels 100% inexcusable. (And if you do any SwiftUI development, get ready for a lot of “The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time” caused by a bog-standard parameter type mismatch. This is more excusable though, since SwiftUI seems to do unspeakably complicated things with generics and existentials so I could see things getting tangled up sometimes)