Ask HN: Why is Xcode so buggy?

[ians]

Xcode crashes or beachballs at least once a day for me. I am not doing building anything crazy, all pretty basic apps, but I am constantly having issues with it. These issues occur across different hardware and OS X installs so I don't think it has to do with my setup. I understand it is a large complicated piece of software but for something that Apple uses in house to build pretty much all of their software products how can it be this bad?

[halotrope]

As I was using more and more products of jetBrains recently (IntelliJ, Android Studio, RubyMine) I thought I would give AppCode a shot. I have to say its the far better IDE in a lot of regards of refactoring, code navigation, code generation, unit testing, keyboard centricity and my beloved vim-mode and cocoapods. It lacks in regards to project settings and interface builder and is a real resource hog however you can have them running side by side. So now I use AppCode for most of the actual editing / programming and xCode for configuring certificates / signing, archiving and interface builder. Works out rather nicely as long as your machine can handle it.

[paulrpotts]

I have not used the current version but I have used a number of previous versions, and my experience is that it certainly has not always been this way. Many versions have been very reliable for me, although granted I use it mostly for developing command line tools in C/C++. But even when doing development for iOS a couple of years ago, it was very solid. XCode has its roots in ProjectBuilder for NeXT, a long and distinguished history. Maybe they have released some bad versions. I hope they can get it together.

[aaronbrethorst]

    but for something that Apple uses in house to build
    pretty much all of their software products how can
    it be this bad?

Probably because the Xcode team doesn't dogfood their own tools. I forget exactly when and where this was, but I once talked to someone who interned on Xcode. He stated that almost no one who worked on Xcode actually used it, and most of them were, instead, vi users. Grain of salt, and all that, but it certainly fits.

[kitsunesoba]

That’s funny if true, because I’ve heard that other parts of the company dogfood to an extreme extent.

As a sidenote, I’m rather surprised that there’s no open source Cocoa IDE aimed at Apple platform development. TextMate 2 would make for a great starting point, covering the source editor and file tree portions. LLVM provides all of Xcode’s syntax coloring, error checking, etc, so that’s taken care of too. The three big pieces that’d need to be written are XIB/Storyboard editing, project editing (clang flags, code signing, etc), and integration with clang, iOS simulator, etc. It’s a big project for sure, but far from insurmountable. If it’s written with Obj-C/C++ and Cocoa/Foundation, many of its biggest users would also be its best contributors and the project could go far quickly.

[ians]

If true that makes a lot of sense.

[_RPM]

Why does that make a lot of sense? I'm curious.

[martinni]

You should give AppCode a shot