[wsc981]

> Xcode unironically made me try to change career from iOS developer to pen tester. I've spent way too much time in its guts and I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad.

I've been a mobile dev for many many years and most of my time was spent focused on iOS.

I didn't find Xcode that bad, but sometimes annoying issues do keep popping up, for example stuff related to provisioning profiles.

Last few years more of my time was spent with Xamarin and the macOS version of Visual Studio (rebranded Xamarin Studio) and it's quite a bit worse than Xcode. Xamarin Studio has the tendency to get really slow after extended usage and I pretty much never had such issues with Xcode. Few things are more frustrating to me (not to mention a huge productivity killer) than writing code in a slow, laggy editor. At least Xcode doesn't have that issue (most of the time).

However, what I really like is to be able to just use a simple text editor for my work. Lately, as a hobby and for side-projects, I've been using Sublime Text with LÖVE 2D (Lua) and this has been really fun to me. No project files to deal with, no complicated UI stuff (visual editors and the like), no more downloading of gigabytes of simulators after an update (as long as I focus on macOS & Windows that is), etc...

With MAUI, Microsoft will make the default Xamarin project structure also really simple, just a few lines of code. That should make it a lot easier to use a simple text editor for Xamarin dev work, instead of the slow Visual Studio for macOS IDE. Perhaps Apple should follow suit with Xcode.

[kitsunesoba]

As another primarly-iOS developer I agree. Xcode was better back when Interface Builder was separate (that merge never should've happened) but as a whole I don't find Xcode any more irritating than I find Android Studio (which has found some truly unique ways to be frustrating).

It will be interesting to see where things go in the coming years though, because between SwiftPM, SwiftUI, SourceKit, and the SourceKit LSP I think many of us may be shifting toward a workflow more centered around a light editor. A few days ago I was toying around with SourceKit LSP in Sublime Text 4 and it's surprisingly servicable - most of my projects have abandoned xibs/storyboards already so I could probably make that setup work if I put some time into getting Sublime's build system set up.

[jamil7]

Did you manage to get SourceKit LSP picking up SPM dependencies? I tried it out with neovim last year and that was one issue I had. I’d probably do most of my editing in there if I could.

[void_mint]

> I've been a mobile dev for many many years and most of my time was spent focused on iOS.

> I didn't find Xcode that bad, but sometimes annoying issues do keep popping up, for example stuff related to provisioning profiles.

In my experience, iOS/macOS devs have just kind of "got used to it" with regard to Apple's developer tooling. Once you know how to work with all of it at an advanced level it doesn't seem that bad.

I think the issue is when developers that haven't spent considerable amounts of time acclimating have to work with Apple's dev tools. If you haven't been hazed into being productive with Apple's tools, they won't work how you expect and it won't be obvious why.

[akmarinov]

Isn’t that pretty much all IDEs if you come over from whatever you’re used to?

[void_mint]

No, I would say most languages and IDEs are not as complex/bloated/unpredictable as Apple developer tools.

[josephg]

I’m a polyglot and love trying new languages and platforms. I’ve spent serious time with eclipse (Java), IntelliJ (rust), vscode (rust, javascript, typescript, C), vim (all), visual studio (C++, c#). I have lots of Apple devices, I care about platform-native software and I love the swift programming language. And call me crazy but I loved Xcode with Obj-C back when it was 3.x.

So I can say with confidence that writing swift using modern Xcode is the worst experience with an IDE I’ve ever had. Dropped keystrokes, random crashing, device-dependent compiler errors (“Error: this method spent too long type checking”). And so on. It’s an obvious, avoidable disaster zone. Dear Apple, fixing the bugs in your software is more important than adding new features!

In comparison, VSCode+Typescript and Visual Studio+C# are the best IDE experiences I’ve had. Fast, stable, smooth, reliable and easy to set up. And little things work well - like inline documentation, autocomplete, project wide renaming and integrated debugging. Microsoft nails it. IntelliJ+Rust is close but it has a few obvious rough edges.

[ASalazarMX]

It's the only IDE I've used where I couldn't trust it not to crash. IDEs should not crash, even if rarely.

[josephg]

No software should crash; and if it does, you figure out why it crashes and fix the problem.

The fact that Xcode crashes reliably, and has done so for years without being fixed is a stain on apple’s reputation for making otherwise good products.