> Hard disagree on this. I can't think of any IDE that performs as badly, or is as unreliable as Xcode.
Well then, great material for an interesting dialogue :)
> Intellij is significantly more complex and its still more responsive. (And its reliably responsive. I've never experienced typing lag in intellij on my M1).
I don't know if even the full IntelliJ is more complex, but it is at least quite complex while being reliable, and deserves a lot of credit for that. I've always defended it, particularly for it's robust semantic full project search capability for which it also happens to do better than XCode. If they brought back or renewed a product for building against Apple platforms, I'd consider it. My main argument is that it would be a truly remarkable feat for any company or project to compete with Xcode and reach close to feature parity without relying on features already part of Xcode. It still supports building and compiling (based on a cursory search) Pascal, C++, C, ObjC, ObjC++, and even Python, Java, and Ruby, simulation on at least 6 different platforms/device types, interface building click and drag for mac and iOS, some kind of AR/VR environment, and I think is used to build itself. I'd use PyCharm though if building any sufficiently complex python app, and Android Studio presumably for that, so some of the theoretical capabilities of Xcode are already better served by others. A hypothetical competitor shouldn't try to replicate all of those though, instead shooting for a market of anyone who's developing for the last 10 years of platforms in just Objective-C, Swift, SwiftUI would be the move.
> Microsoft's Visual studio (not vs code) is honestly fabulous compared to xcode. VS is of a similar vintage to xcode, with just as many "cobbled together" features added over the years - from VB to C# and .net, winforms to WPF to whatever the latest thing is. But its still fast and reliable. Well, its fast and an order of magnitude more reliable than xcode.
You're probably right, but only has relatively recently had a mac version, otherwise I'd be working with what I'd anecdotally say is just an annoying as hell and unstable OS where all the legacy stuff is still highly visible. I've never pushed Visual Studio hard, but I do recall it being as decent as you say.
Ultimately what I'd like to see is more diversity in the native apple platform dev space, and for the Xcode team to confront the reliability and performance problems you mention and everyone experiences. I believe they introduced a new linker last year for example, and hope to see it improve dramatically. Maybe the right move for them is to build a much more nimble first-party sibling solution. I'm not even on an M1+ yet, still this shitty Intel thing, and I hear these issues daily when my jet engine spins up.
Yeah; I’m not claiming either IntelliJ or visual studio are viable replacements for Xcode when you want to make an iPhone or Mac app. My point is that the engineering quality of both visual studio and IntelliJ is dramatically better than the engineering quality of Xcode.
Building a good, reliable, fast IDE with modern features is clearly a task other software teams have been able to succeed at. Xcode has no excuse for its bugs. It feels like the result of demo driven development - where features are worked on just enough to demo them - either internally or at wwdc. But it takes more work to ship a good product than it does to make a snazzy demo. And, for some reason that work just doesn’t seem to happen in the Xcode team. Not since Xcode version 3 or so.
Well then, great material for an interesting dialogue :)
> Intellij is significantly more complex and its still more responsive. (And its reliably responsive. I've never experienced typing lag in intellij on my M1).
I don't know if even the full IntelliJ is more complex, but it is at least quite complex while being reliable, and deserves a lot of credit for that. I've always defended it, particularly for it's robust semantic full project search capability for which it also happens to do better than XCode. If they brought back or renewed a product for building against Apple platforms, I'd consider it. My main argument is that it would be a truly remarkable feat for any company or project to compete with Xcode and reach close to feature parity without relying on features already part of Xcode. It still supports building and compiling (based on a cursory search) Pascal, C++, C, ObjC, ObjC++, and even Python, Java, and Ruby, simulation on at least 6 different platforms/device types, interface building click and drag for mac and iOS, some kind of AR/VR environment, and I think is used to build itself. I'd use PyCharm though if building any sufficiently complex python app, and Android Studio presumably for that, so some of the theoretical capabilities of Xcode are already better served by others. A hypothetical competitor shouldn't try to replicate all of those though, instead shooting for a market of anyone who's developing for the last 10 years of platforms in just Objective-C, Swift, SwiftUI would be the move.
> Microsoft's Visual studio (not vs code) is honestly fabulous compared to xcode. VS is of a similar vintage to xcode, with just as many "cobbled together" features added over the years - from VB to C# and .net, winforms to WPF to whatever the latest thing is. But its still fast and reliable. Well, its fast and an order of magnitude more reliable than xcode.
You're probably right, but only has relatively recently had a mac version, otherwise I'd be working with what I'd anecdotally say is just an annoying as hell and unstable OS where all the legacy stuff is still highly visible. I've never pushed Visual Studio hard, but I do recall it being as decent as you say.
Ultimately what I'd like to see is more diversity in the native apple platform dev space, and for the Xcode team to confront the reliability and performance problems you mention and everyone experiences. I believe they introduced a new linker last year for example, and hope to see it improve dramatically. Maybe the right move for them is to build a much more nimble first-party sibling solution. I'm not even on an M1+ yet, still this shitty Intel thing, and I hear these issues daily when my jet engine spins up.