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Comment by adrianotadao | Hacker News Reader

I like Swift but I hate the Xcode and the Apple tools. Is so painful to code with it. Apple needs to change its entire development flow. Even working with the react-native I need to use Xcode. =l

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Why do you feel it's painful? I've only written a tiny desktop menu bar app with it, but I liked the clean look of it and it didn't feel so cramped like Visual Studio.

Maybe I just don't have written with it enough.

If you work with a large-ish ObjC+Swift project, XCode is quite painful. I regularly lose syntax coloring. Compile errors get stuck and don't disappear when the code is fixed. Refactoring Swift code is non existent. Importing images in the project locks the entire UI thread. Storyboards that are more then a couple of screens take ages to open and edit.

SourceKit should help XCode to reason about Swift code but somehow XCode gets lost at least once or twice a day on my machine (MBP 15" i7, 16GB RAM).

Android development tools used to suck but since Android Studio 2.0 and the rise of Swift, it is now iOS dev tools that are lagging behind.

> I regularly lose syntax coloring.

Yep. Happens to me all the time too. Make some changes to code, then wait half a second of the syntax coloring to take effect.

How this is not instant boggles the mind. Maybe it's related to SourceKitService which randomly decides start taking up 100% CPU for no discernible reason.

SourceKit itself is fairly stable. However it embeds a copy of the Swift type checker. :-)

It's certainly stable, it just likes to take up 100% of the CPU.

It happens especially when writing new code or refactoring old code in a medium sized project and using function or variable names that don't yet exist but that I'm about to add in the next few minutes.

For example say I want take a chunk of code and move it to a new function fooBar. So I cut the old code and then replace it with a call to a not yet written fooBar function.

Then I go to write the definition of fooBar and paste previous code in there but before I can do that, SourceKitService has got itself into a CPU frenzy that won't calm down for 15-20 minutes (even after finishing writing the fooBar function) while it presumably tries to find where fooBar was defined.

It's gotten to the point where I have disabled 'live issues' (which seems to exacerbate the problem) and regularly have to kill the SourceKitService process so my fans will go back to normal.

I can honestly say that Xcode is the worst piece of software I have ever used.

It's incredibly slow, it has always been riddled with bugs, it has crashed on me more often than any other software, and it is lacking so much functionality that it doesn't deserve to be called an IDE at all.

For instance, it can't even rename a Swift function years after Swift's introduction.

You should give Android Studio a try, you will no longer complain about XCode being slow.

What is this, the paralympics of software IDEs?

First place: Xcode

Second place: Driveway chalk with a water hose

Third place: Android Studio

hahahaha I need to agree with you. Xcode is bad but Android Studio is worse than everything else.

You forgot Lotus Notes.

I need to agree with you, Apple tools, in general, are very strange...

Xcode is very slow. Every time that I open it, my computer switch on the cooler, the memory of my mac have a spike of consuming.

I don't like the IDE itself... for instance, if I need to rename something, Xcode uses an XML that when you have a team working on the same project, you will have huge problems with merge the commits.

Maybe the problem is me, but, I know XCode since 2012 and I never like it! =l

Have you tried the JetBrains AppCode IDE?

Never, is it a good choice?

Why do you feel the need to use Xcode (rather than just running the compiler and codesign tools using the build environment of your choice)?

Hum, to be honest, I don't like the Apple development flow. I don't like the Apple developer center, I don't like the Certificates, etc etc. In my case, I need to use XCode to find out the right places to link the react-native lib to my project...

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