Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcosson | Hacker News Reader

One other downside is XCode. No refactoring support, and lots of errors that give you little help. For instance, if you're trying to implement a protocol which is itself a few layers of nested protocols, XCode will just tell you it doesn't conform and not what method you're missing, so you have to dig through and check every signature of every method carefully.

The swift 2 to 3 migration was absolutely insane, I'd estimate Xcode did maybe 25% of the work automatically and left me with hundreds of different errors to convert manually (and often they were red herrings where the actual error was not where Xcode said it was). And you have to rebuild all dependency frameworks on swift 3 as well since the binaries are incompatible. If you use Swift make sure you have 2-3 whole developer days per year to devote to just migrating to the next version in a medium sized project.

View on HN

I would agree with this. The biggest issue with Swift right now is Xcode. Multiple times each day, syntax highlighting and code completion will break, even though the code is perfectly valid. The lack of refactor support after three Xcode releases and major versions of Swift is inexcusable.

Using storyboards is super frustrating due to the load times. It seems no one at Apple tests with more than one storyboard in a project.

I love going back to Ruby dev because VS Code is just such a joy to work in compared with Xcode. Xcode really struggles on my top of the line MBP with 16GB RAM.

I still love the language compared to ObjC but the tooling is abysmal. Every year we hold out hope that Xcode will magically get better but its the iTunes of IDEs at this point.

Well I don't know any experienced developer that would put more than three populated scenes in a Storyboard. I would only add more if it was something like a navigation setup (navcontroller, menu, etc) where I would simply nest a lot of empty screens and link to the real screens with storyboard references.

You can always use AppCode if you don't like Xcode.

AppCode has also become increasingly buggy over the last year or so, and is now almost as unusable as Xcode (albeit in different ways).

On my computer, recent versions of AppCode constantly use at least 100% CPU, even when it's in the background doing nothing. I got this a few times in earlier versions as well, but an "Invalidate caches and restart" usually fixed the problem. No such luck with recent versions. It will always use at least 100% when it's running.

I often get 30 seconds of beachball when I switch back to AppCode from some other app, despite having 16GB of RAM and not running any other remotely heavy app. This will happen even if I just leave AppCode for half a minute in order to check something on a web page. It's gotten so bad that I've developed the habit of checking web pages on my iPad instead of on my Mac, in order to avoid temporarily leaving AppCode.

There is a particularly infuriating bug that will sometimes cause AppCode to freeze when I type the opening parenthesis of a function invocation. When this happens, killing, restarting and typing again won't work, AppCode will freeze at the same spot. The only workaround I have found when this happens is to type my function invocation in some other editor and copy and paste to AppCode (often after waiting the usual 30 seconds for AppCode to stop beachballing).

It is not just me – all my coworkers suffer from the same problems. AppCode is by far the most annoying app I use on a daily basis. I hate it nearly – but not quite – as much as Xcode.

This is my point - I use multiple storyboards to break up the app and use storyboard references where appropriate. But loading up individual storyboards, waiting for them to render (which takes far longer now with @IBDesignable), etc is such a drain in productivity.

Swift is amazing, Xcode is crap, and I've been using Xcode and its NeXT version for almost 20 years. I work in Xcode every day and every day I want to hurl it. Apparently Apple either doesn't care or is too overwhelmed with building 4 OSs every year. To be effective for building server side apps we need a new dev environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com