[vikeri]

The fact that Apple's developer tooling is described as great makes me suspicious if the author has used JS tooling in a serious way. VS Code is just so much better than XCode. My experience developing native apps in SwiftUI is also that the documentation is very very lacking. And lastly I wasn't able to get a hover effect without dropping tons of frames. My lack of experience I'm sure is partly to blame for the app's poor performance, but it certainly wasn't performant out of the box. React would have been significantly more performant for my use case.

[sgt]

Web development is almost hell compared to developing with Apple tooling. At least that's been my experience. I primarily do web development when it comes to UI, but I dream of going back to Swift, Xcode and macOS.

[duped]

I strongly disagree, XCode is so bad compared to VS Code and JetBrains I have to believe that Apple engineers are forbidden from using anything else, because they don't seem to want to improve it.

My experience was primarily driven by C/C++ development though. I've heard better things about swift, but I just can't grok how the hell xcode projects are supposed to be used at all and the tool is so slow it's unusable.

[sgt]

I agree that in terms of pure editor and IDE capabilities, JetBrains is better than Xcode. I am rather thinking of the actual Apple ecosystem with SDK, API's etc.

[cersa8]

Not my experience. I was happy to leave Xcode behind for vscode after years of iOS development.

[lacrosse_tannin]

xcode is so busted and so are all their apis and documentation. I don't know how people are arguing with you.

I'd prefer electron even it wasn't cross platform. I could write the app 4 times in electron faster than installing xcode.

[Shadonototra]

Wrong

People who say such thing have no idea what they are talking about

Debugging with VSCode is a joke, and there is no GUI preview for Cocoa/UIKit/SwiftUI

XCode has many flaws, but it's properly integrated and helps you to make beautiful native apps

VSCode is a UX nightmare

[jeffkeen]

VS code feels so third-party-extension and custom-config dependent and I’m sure OP has their VS code settings _just right_ for them, but that does not make it a good editor for everyone.

I love this community, but the people who are comfy configuring Linux and cant understand why everyone doesn’t roll their own solutions generally don’t know shit about what good UX is.

VScode ain’t it, that’s for sure.

[handsaway]

Installing the most popular LSP implementation for the language you're using is hardly comparable to setting up, like, an Arch install.

[handsaway]

Not really fair to compare the dev experiences _for macOS development_ across VSCode and XCode. I wouldn't recommend using VSCode for Cocoa/UIKit/SwiftUI dev.

I'll say that working on TS/React in VSCode is head and shoulders above Swift in XCode from a DX perspective. I had to routinely restart XCode to verify that type errors were actually there, it was incredibly slow, and the Swift compiler would give up on highly polymorphic types and red line them.

[realusername]

I'm not going to be objective but XCode is the single worst piece of software I ever used.

12 GB to download, more sluggish than the worst electron app, terrible UX, undocumented config files screwing up with git, terrible error messages, app upload is so unreliable even Apple had to create a third party app and tied to the OS version.

Developers have no choice, it's clear and they know it.

[scrumper]

JetBrains had a go at an Xcode alternative a few years ago, I wonder if that ever took off? AppCode I think?