Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clane | Hacker News Reader

What I want to know as somebody trying to learn C/C++, is Xcode good for somebody who is wanting to try their hand at bare metal stuff? I always hear how bad it is outside of app dev. but can it help me be productive compared to CLI environment or just using a text editor with nifty add-ons?

View on HN

I've written a lot of C++ code in Xcode. Xcode is a pretty poor IDE in general but it works reasonably well for C++. IMO things like autocomplete and a graphical debugger are enough of a productivity boost that I wouldn't want to use a plain editor.

Yes, and the ability to find call references (who is calling this function, where is it used) from the drop-down menu is really helpful. I miss the ease of access to that sort of functionality in Visual Studio.

Maybe I'm not using the same version of Visual Studio as you are, but Find All References is right there on the context menu when I right-click in VS.

Also shift+F12

Yes it is there for me, but the functionality is different on Xcode as it will find all references when you open the menu, so you can see the results straight away. One less click (and perhaps one less popup hidden "find symbol results" pane in VS).

That was what I was highlighting, not the fact that Visual Studio somehow doesn't have that functionality.

I would recommend using QtCreator if you want to do just pure C++ work done. It has less focus on app development and it has way better highlighting (semantic highlighting thanks to clang), refactoring and debugging.

Instruments, included with Xcode, is a really good tool. I used instruments for profiling and finding memory leaks... I think it was great... except for the lack of reverse debugging which is pretty much necessary these days.

I recommend this video to see some good example about reverse debugging with gdb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=713ay4bZUrw

I have used both Xcode and Text editor & Terminal for C/C++ development. In my opinion both work equally well but I would advise you to use the Text editor and Terminal method because it means you need to learn how things like build systems, LLDB, Valgrind and more work. This knowledge is essential when the IDE does something Unexpected and you need to fix it.

Xcode is not your only IDE option on macOS for C/C++. Decent ones: Eclipse CDT, Qt Creator, CLion.

It's slightly better than a text editor, but not by much

Reply on news.ycombinator.com