[yashap]

I’m a primarily backend dev who works on mobile apps sometimes, and I strongly agree. It’s a truly terrible and frustrating piece of software. It tries to do way too many things, and does them all poorly.

Even doing something as simple as upgrading Xcode via the App Store is painful, often progressing insanely slowly and taking hours or even tens of hours on an otherwise fast connection. It has been like this for years and years and Apple has done nothing to fix it, like most Xcode issues.

[_mlxl]

I want people who haven't used Xcode to understand that this isn't a connection issue, there is something specifically weird happening with Xcode when you try to upgrade it.

It has to be wed to the OS in such a way that makes the propensity for this vague failure state to occur, because I've never had it happen with anything else.

Upgrading from the App Store sometimes will hang at 99% and no matter what you do save some weird incantations to remove stuff from this secret App Store cache to remove the download to begin its excruciatingly slow download again, only with the hope in your heart this impenetrable and silent error doesn't happen again.

And of course none of this is addressed by Apple. You think you can just download versions from the developer site? Well enjoy, and I am not joking, a 30+ minute unzipping of the .xip file (yep that's right, it's not a .zip).

Apple does not care about it's developer ecosystem, even though you are such a huge part of it's success. It's apparent in their thread bare documentation, their terrible tools, their greedy practises.

I get it. They are a business. But they do not deserve their halo.

[akmarinov]

It used to be a zip, there’s a reason why they changed it to xip

[AJRF]

That reason being digital signatures. You can get the same confidence from posting an MD5 hash to check. Xips are an awful solution to fix a solved problem.

[akmarinov]

Absolutely no one will bother to do the check.

[saagarjha]

The reason is stupid for the problem it solves.

[MobileVet]

I started downloading the dmg manually quite a few years back... and have never adopted the AppStore version. So painful.

This SO post is continually updated with the latest builds and is a bookmark for me. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10335747/how-to-download...

[anaerobicover]

You might also like https://xcodereleases.com/ which is updated automatically.

[saagarjha]

I believe it is actually updated manually.

[smoldesu]

Xcode is ludicrously large. Most installs will clock in 50-60 gigs, but I've seen more full setups exceed 100gb.

Why is this the current paradigm of developing on a platform that notoriously "just works"?

[saagarjha]

Xcode is nowhere near that large, unless you never clear out its caches.

[domano]

And they tax the CPU pretty hard too.

[MobileVet]

This, so much this.

I have a fully loaded MBP 16” w/ i9, 32GB RAM and the fan starts very quickly due to indexing and whatever else it is doing.

[josephg]

I have a 2016 MacBook Pro which has gradually become completely useless for swift development in Xcode. The computer sometimes randomly reindexes while I type, which can lag Xcode so much that it drops keystrokes. And as a result if I’m not watching closely, sometimes method names will come out garbled. To reiterate, Xcode makes my $3000 computer from a few years ago so slow that I can’t type the name of a function.

A few months ago I moved to a ryzen development machine running Linux mint to code rust using IntelliJ. Responsiveness and stability is night and day. It’s a shame, too - swift is a lovely language and I’d love to use it more. But life is too short to put up with Xcode.

[MobileVet]

Crazy right? $3.5k and it can’t handle indexing / compiling Swift?!

Some other devs on the team just got M1s. They are backend though... so I haven’t seen an M1 running Xcode yet. Very curious but I am guessing it is night and day... for half the cost or less.