8 ms·

now they just need to open source Xcode..

boterock 11y ago
swift comes with 'swift-ide'test' which I believe is the linter/codecompleter that would allow any text editor to have the features that xcode has
- akanet 11y ago
  Interesting! I found https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/master/tools/swift-ide-test https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/master/tools/swift-ide-t..., which seems to be what you describe, but seems a bit tricky to use. Can you point to any OSS implementations of a Swift completer?
mightykan 11y ago
I’m not sure you’d really want the crap-fest that is Xcode’s code. It has so many bugs and issues that it’s a better idea to completely dump it and either start over or give up and adopt something like AppCode, like Google did with Android Studio. Making developer tools is just not Apple’s forte and Xcode’s sad state of quality and performance is clear indication of that. I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. There is no way Apple’s engineers could get any work done if they use Xcode. Or, they should start charging money for it so they could justify spending resources on the dev tools. One of the reasons (among many) that Visual Studio is still the king of all IDEs is because Microsoft charges money for the serious bits of it (Pro and higher).
- alextgordon 11y ago
  Xcode works fine for me. I can't say the same for Android Studio, which seems to require a machine more powerful than a top-of-the-line MBP.
- sghodas 11y ago
  I think you're seriously overstating the issues with Xcode. There are bugs and annoyances, but things have gotten better over the years. It's not as great as Visual Studio, but it's far from horrible. Remember, we live in a world with Eclipse.
  - ascagnel_ 10y ago
    Is Eclipse still growing exponentially? I remember Ganymede -> Helios increasing 2MM LOC, Helios -> Indigo 4MM LOC, and Indigo -> Juno 8MM LOC. I couldn't even get Luna to run, and haven't checked back in on it since then. The foundation started to bundle up too much stuff in the distributed versions.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  If AppCode ran on other platforms and became a Swift IDE that would be great honestly, not sure how long before JetBrains attempts this. As things stand those of us curious for Swift without any access to Apple products are left with just plain text-editors.
  - AsyncAwait 11y ago
    The new CLion 2016.1 release has some Swift support on Linux via a plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240 https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240
  - dcgoss 10y ago
    I want to use Appcode, but the support/autocomplete for swift is just not as good as XCode.
- Longhanks 11y ago
  "Making developer tools is just not Apple’s forte" I'm sorry, but LLVM?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Technically, LLVM started as a research project at UIUC, and then Apple hired the principals and adopted the project in 2005. The LLVM website is still hosted by UIUC, and Google and other companies are also significant contributors.
    - feelix 10y ago
      Right, Apple DID NOT make LLVM. They just hired the guy that did (Chris Lattner) well after it was fully established.
      - zw 10y ago
        And then maintained it and fostered its growth while it became the foundation of modern computing…?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        iagooar 10y ago
        Some people are really scared of Apple being cool.
        lmm 10y ago
        Maintaining and growing an existing tool with its existing developers who you bought in is a good thing and to be applauded, but doesn't necessarily mean the company is good at tooling in general. The cultural requirements are very different.
      - ghshephard 10y ago
        You've just described 90% of every major product from a technology company.
- feelix 11y ago
  >I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. That's an interesting point and it makes a lot of sense. With the scale of the codebases a lot of them are working on I also don't see how they could be productive while working in XCode. And also XCode could not be this buggy and broken if it had internal developers working with it and constantly reporting bugs.
  - koverstreet 10y ago
    The response from a friend who works at apple was laughter and "if only". personally, I'm the kind of guy with a "vim 4 life" tattoo, so I don't really know why people put up with crappy IDEs...
  - m4x 10y ago
    How does it make a lot of sense? If Apple had a tool that was better than Xcode, why would they hide it from the public? They have proven themselves to be quite motivated to provide developers with good tools and frankly I find the idea that they keep a better tool hidden away ridiculous.
    - feelix 10y ago
      thought_alarm got it right. The experienced developers probably use open source editors / debuggers, unsuitable for the masses. Not an Apple-only tool, but still not XCode.
  - thought_alarm 10y ago
    The experienced developers at Apple are no different than the experienced developers elsewhere. They use the LLDB command-line and write their code in Emacs. I've never liked Visual Studio, and the last time I worked on a serious Windows product most of the experienced developers used WinDbg and cordbg rather than the neutered Visual Studio debugger. And some guys still wrote their code in Visual Studio 6 rather than the newer .NET IDEs. My problem with Xcode today is that it's too much like Visual Studio. I'll take Xcode 3 with LLDB any day.
- stutsmansoft 10y ago
  I think Xcode, Instruments etc are _amazing_ tools...especially for the price. Compare with the Android toolchain.
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    >especially for the price. Yup! They're free! I have found Apple's developer ecosystem to be fantastic overall.
- flipgimble 10y ago
  That is not my experience at all using Xcode professionally for the past 3+ years, and Visual Studio for over 7 years. Most of the complaints I've heard from colleagues about Xcode seemed from using unofficial 3rd party plugins, or Xcode's inferior c++ support for massive projects haphazardly ported form windows. Xcode for iOS and Mac development has been the most productive IDE I've used professionally, not without its flaws, and unintuitive nuances, but continually improving. Yearly major ticket feature additions like UI Unit testing shows me Apple is still heavily investing in developer tools.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > like Google did with Android Studio You mean by still not being able to provide an working experience to the NDK users, three years later? Or by redoing their plugins for Android Studio 2.0, forcing devs that rely on something stable to still be on Android Studio 1.5? Also by having each release be a bug party that make people at /r/androiddev/ wonder if they ever test what they release?
- hellofunk 10y ago
  I find Xcode quite a joy to use. It seems well laid-out, not a lot of UI chrome, easy to find the things you need and get things out of the way when you don't. Code completion, debugging, it's all pretty great for me. Not sure if the degree of your hate for it is accurate.
  - melloclello 10y ago
    I agree, Xcode is definitely the best looking IDE by light years. Now if only it had a dark mode...
    - hellofunk 10y ago
      Have you checked out the Fonts and Colors panel in the Preferences? You can choose both font color and background color and other items.
      - melloclello 10y ago
        Yeah, but all the panels remain white.
Ingon 10y ago
I think it would far more beneficial if they open source Cocoa/CocoaTouch. I don't care how the IDE works as much as the stuff I use every single day.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  I agree. I don't even need very permissive license, just to look at sources would be enough. Sometimes I have to lurk around internet corners just to find out simple things which would require few minutes with source code access. It's so frustrating after Java environment where almost everything is available in source code.
  - LeoNatan25 10y ago
    The "source" is almost out there. Attaching the debugger to a 64-bit simulator and putting a breakpoint on Apple methods and functions, you can effortlessly read the disassembler code output by lldb/Xcode. I have fixed and learned countless UIKit-related bugs like that.

swift comes with 'swift-ide'test' which I believe is the linter/codecompleter that would allow any text editor to have the features that xcode has

akanet 11y ago
Interesting! I found https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/master/tools/swift-ide-test https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/master/tools/swift-ide-t..., which seems to be what you describe, but seems a bit tricky to use. Can you point to any OSS implementations of a Swift completer?

mightykan 11y ago

I’m not sure you’d really want the crap-fest that is Xcode’s code. It has so many bugs and issues that it’s a better idea to completely dump it and either start over or give up and adopt something like AppCode, like Google did with Android Studio. Making developer tools is just not Apple’s forte and Xcode’s sad state of quality and performance is clear indication of that. I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. There is no way Apple’s engineers could get any work done if they use Xcode. Or, they should start charging money for it so they could justify spending resources on the dev tools. One of the reasons (among many) that Visual Studio is still the king of all IDEs is because Microsoft charges money for the serious bits of it (Pro and higher).

alextgordon 11y ago
Xcode works fine for me. I can't say the same for Android Studio, which seems to require a machine more powerful than a top-of-the-line MBP.
sghodas 11y ago
I think you're seriously overstating the issues with Xcode. There are bugs and annoyances, but things have gotten better over the years. It's not as great as Visual Studio, but it's far from horrible. Remember, we live in a world with Eclipse.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  Is Eclipse still growing exponentially? I remember Ganymede -> Helios increasing 2MM LOC, Helios -> Indigo 4MM LOC, and Indigo -> Juno 8MM LOC. I couldn't even get Luna to run, and haven't checked back in on it since then. The foundation started to bundle up too much stuff in the distributed versions.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
If AppCode ran on other platforms and became a Swift IDE that would be great honestly, not sure how long before JetBrains attempts this. As things stand those of us curious for Swift without any access to Apple products are left with just plain text-editors.
- AsyncAwait 11y ago
  The new CLion 2016.1 release has some Swift support on Linux via a plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240 https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240
- dcgoss 10y ago
  I want to use Appcode, but the support/autocomplete for swift is just not as good as XCode.
Longhanks 11y ago
"Making developer tools is just not Apple’s forte" I'm sorry, but LLVM?
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Technically, LLVM started as a research project at UIUC, and then Apple hired the principals and adopted the project in 2005. The LLVM website is still hosted by UIUC, and Google and other companies are also significant contributors.
  - feelix 10y ago
    Right, Apple DID NOT make LLVM. They just hired the guy that did (Chris Lattner) well after it was fully established.
    - zw 10y ago
      And then maintained it and fostered its growth while it became the foundation of modern computing…?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - iagooar 10y ago
        Some people are really scared of Apple being cool.
      - lmm 10y ago
        Maintaining and growing an existing tool with its existing developers who you bought in is a good thing and to be applauded, but doesn't necessarily mean the company is good at tooling in general. The cultural requirements are very different.
    - ghshephard 10y ago
      You've just described 90% of every major product from a technology company.
feelix 11y ago
>I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. That's an interesting point and it makes a lot of sense. With the scale of the codebases a lot of them are working on I also don't see how they could be productive while working in XCode. And also XCode could not be this buggy and broken if it had internal developers working with it and constantly reporting bugs.
- koverstreet 10y ago
  The response from a friend who works at apple was laughter and "if only". personally, I'm the kind of guy with a "vim 4 life" tattoo, so I don't really know why people put up with crappy IDEs...
- m4x 10y ago
  How does it make a lot of sense? If Apple had a tool that was better than Xcode, why would they hide it from the public? They have proven themselves to be quite motivated to provide developers with good tools and frankly I find the idea that they keep a better tool hidden away ridiculous.
  - feelix 10y ago
    thought_alarm got it right. The experienced developers probably use open source editors / debuggers, unsuitable for the masses. Not an Apple-only tool, but still not XCode.
- thought_alarm 10y ago
  The experienced developers at Apple are no different than the experienced developers elsewhere. They use the LLDB command-line and write their code in Emacs. I've never liked Visual Studio, and the last time I worked on a serious Windows product most of the experienced developers used WinDbg and cordbg rather than the neutered Visual Studio debugger. And some guys still wrote their code in Visual Studio 6 rather than the newer .NET IDEs. My problem with Xcode today is that it's too much like Visual Studio. I'll take Xcode 3 with LLDB any day.
stutsmansoft 10y ago
I think Xcode, Instruments etc are _amazing_ tools...especially for the price. Compare with the Android toolchain.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  >especially for the price. Yup! They're free! I have found Apple's developer ecosystem to be fantastic overall.
flipgimble 10y ago
That is not my experience at all using Xcode professionally for the past 3+ years, and Visual Studio for over 7 years. Most of the complaints I've heard from colleagues about Xcode seemed from using unofficial 3rd party plugins, or Xcode's inferior c++ support for massive projects haphazardly ported form windows. Xcode for iOS and Mac development has been the most productive IDE I've used professionally, not without its flaws, and unintuitive nuances, but continually improving. Yearly major ticket feature additions like UI Unit testing shows me Apple is still heavily investing in developer tools.
pjmlp 10y ago
> like Google did with Android Studio You mean by still not being able to provide an working experience to the NDK users, three years later? Or by redoing their plugins for Android Studio 2.0, forcing devs that rely on something stable to still be on Android Studio 1.5? Also by having each release be a bug party that make people at /r/androiddev/ wonder if they ever test what they release?
hellofunk 10y ago
I find Xcode quite a joy to use. It seems well laid-out, not a lot of UI chrome, easy to find the things you need and get things out of the way when you don't. Code completion, debugging, it's all pretty great for me. Not sure if the degree of your hate for it is accurate.
- melloclello 10y ago
  I agree, Xcode is definitely the best looking IDE by light years. Now if only it had a dark mode...
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    Have you checked out the Fonts and Colors panel in the Preferences? You can choose both font color and background color and other items.
    - melloclello 10y ago
      Yeah, but all the panels remain white.

Ingon 10y ago

I think it would far more beneficial if they open source Cocoa/CocoaTouch. I don't care how the IDE works as much as the stuff I use every single day.

vbezhenar 10y ago
I agree. I don't even need very permissive license, just to look at sources would be enough. Sometimes I have to lurk around internet corners just to find out simple things which would require few minutes with source code access. It's so frustrating after Java environment where almost everything is available in source code.
- LeoNatan25 10y ago
  The "source" is almost out there. Attaching the debugger to a 64-bit simulator and putting a breakpoint on Apple methods and functions, you can effortlessly read the disassembler code output by lldb/Xcode. I have fixed and learned countless UIKit-related bugs like that.