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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I never understand the praise for XCode. I love the iOS specific features like GUI creator out property explorer. But the text editor part is just awful compared to anything else I've used (primarily JetBrains IDEs, but also vim, sublime and some atom). On top of that it also has comparatively poor git integration.

Edit: one thing I forgot is the very slow feedback at least when editing Swift. For syntax error notifications to get updated sometimes takes tens of second which can be very confusing.

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Yeah agree. While I've moved on, IMHO xcode was generally crap compared to dev envs I used back in the friggin 90's, like Delphi or Topspeed. Not many on HN know much about Delphi, but it set the gold standard for the desktop IDE.

Great thing about Go is you don't need much of an IDE because it's best to just keep Go in its sweet spot, which is services. LiteIDE works great for Go- small footprint,debugging, enough project management to get by. Just like with everything else about Go, you can get a newbie dev going with the Go toolchain actually producing something that works in hardly any time.

To add some anecdata, I know three people (myself included) who moved from "playing with Delphi 5 as a student" into iOS dev. And I still feel that ObjC in Xcode is (sadly) the best replacement for Delphi right now:

- A stable and pragmatic language that interfaces well with the C world.

- Nice separation of class interface/implementation; ARC is as easy as COM was in Delphi; solid reflection/metaprogramming capabilities (e.g. enumerating properties).

- Compilation is fast enough on my 5y/o laptop.

- A standard library that is so good that people never re-invent it.

- The debugger works really well and is always-on (IntelliJ still has separate "Run" and "Debug" buttons, facepalm).

- IBDesignable/IBInspectable makes writing your own components as nice as it was in Delphi: http://nshipster.com/ibinspectable-ibdesignable/

The points above will probably fall apart with Swift, but right now it's not actually too bad.

Agreed. I don't use the GUI tools much (I prefer to manually construct stuff, I know, I know...) and XCode has been just awful to work with. Random crashes, freezing while debugging... in the most recent version I can't view log outputs of a process I attach to, and if I try to take a screenshot from the iOS Simulator it immediately crashes.

I'm not sure it should be Apples job to build a best-in-class text editor. I haven't used XCode in a long while, but last time I did it worked pretty well with external text editors, and you could configure the UI in a way that really facilitated using it just for just compiling/debugging.

Every single IDE I've used, I've always used another text editor for doing actual programming. It's nice to have a half-decent text editor in the IDE for debugging (see value of variables in the code, looking up and quickly fixing compile errors, etc).. but I don't expect it to be as powerful as vim, emacs, sublime, et.al.

Have you used any of the JetBrains IDEs?

Coming from an IntelliJ background, one thing that irks me the most when using XCode is: i need to click on the red dot symbol to see the error. For the love of God, just display the error, why do i need to move my hand away from the keyboard to the mouse. It just annoys me enough to lose my coding mojo.

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