[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.