[cosmic_cheese]

At the risk of nitpicking, Xcode isn’t explicitly necessary unless you’re looking to target iDevices specifically. A minimal llvm/clang toolchain can be installed with a terminal command or Homebrew.

And “unbelievably bad” is how I feel when trying to get various projects built from source on any platform all too often. If I’m lucky the maintainer has made a point of getting up and running a matter of running a couple commands but all too often there’s a mountain of assumptions about the user’s environment that cause the build to fail, sending me down rabbitholes. At least with SwiftPM Xcode projects, building is usually as simple as opening the project and hitting ⌘R and doesn’t involve a side trek to Mordor.

[ein0p]

It's not even necessary for iDevices. I have successfully built, signed, and deployed simple apps without Xcode at all, using Bazel. I think CMake has support as well.