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Comment by scosman | Hacker News Reader

Was hoping for Objective C support when I saw it. Would love to get rid of Xcode.

Objective C support? Never going to happen. Swift support? Unlikely, but a stronger possibility thanks to its cross-platform support. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

Objective C is just as open as Swift is I think

Swift is FLOSS, Apache Licensed and built and collaborated on GitHub: https://github.com/apple/swift

Objective C has not had an official open source release, so far as I know.

ETA: Arguing of course how close the gcc/clang implementations of Objective C may or may not be to the Xcode compilers, of course.

Xcode uses Clang/LLVM to compile Objective-C (and used gcc before adopting LLVM). To my knowledge there's nothing closed source involved in the compiler. I had Clang/LLVM compiling Objective-C on Linux a long time ago. Visual Studio for Windows has been able to compile Objective-C for about a year (see https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/ios).

Of what significance is Swift's cross platform support here? Objective-C has had cross-platform support for decades.

Have you looked into AppCode? https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

But don't you need Xcode to build stuff for iOS, macoOS, etc.? How do you integrate the two and is it worth it?

I gave AppCode a small spin recently. It worked pretty well — as I've come to expect from JetBrains. It builds and launches apps directly into your device or simulator (presumably using the command line tools of Xcode). There is, however, no integrated Interface Builder, when you want to edit a XIB or Storyboard, it launches Xcode and you do the editing there.

Other than that XIB/Storyboard quirk it seems pretty solid.

EDIT: For me it wasn't worth it. There's something about Java applications that throws me off. I'm not sure if it's the difference interface or the small lag in input or both. (I do use PyCharm since there is no viable alternative in macOS)

I believe you can use xcode command line tools to build using appcode. Haven't used in ages though, so don't quote me on that

If you are using Objective C what are the problems with Xcode?

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