[flipgimble]

Or more realistically and less dramatically, some these big features took a lot of effort and engineering investment before they were ready for production.

Apple tends to re-think the current technology and implements their ideal solution. This takes longer but avoids the duck tape approach I've seen in various iterations of Visual Studio. As a concrete example the refactoring tools in Xcode9 work for both C++ (for the first time!), Objective-C and Swift using the same framework.

Best of all the API to write your own refactoring tools has been carefully designed, and there have been some high quality external contributions already to the refactoring tools.

[binthere]

I actually think Visual Studio does refactoring pretty well. It is not a new innovation from Apple. Xcode, in this case, is just catching up with a much needed feature and I still think it's not quite there.

[favorited]

It looks the implementation was a significant investment. They built a language-agnostic refactoring engine into Clang and open-sourced it http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2017-June/054286.htm...

[symlinkk]

What's wrong with the way Visual Studio does things?