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Comment by Jakobeha | Hacker News Reader

I used Xcode recently and it's gotten a lot better. It's still not as good as IntelliJ or AppCode but it's usable.

I remember around when Swift came out, Xcode was so bad that I couldn't even use it because typing was ~1 character/second and it would crash every few minutes. It's definitely recovered from that and I can actually type without lag now.

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Xcode had no such problems with Objective-C though... Maybe Swift's design deserves some blame here for years of subpar developer experience.

It wasn't until Swift came out that autocomplete for ObjC in Xcode finally started to function at a useful level.

Autocomplete in Swift is still broken but I don't think it's an issue with the language itself (autocomplete is probably easier to implement in Swift given the nature of the language).

The autocomplete and syntax highlighting feature completely stops working sometimes. It’s beyond frustrating

Simply:

CMD+,

Locations

Derived Data

CMD+Q Xcode

Delete!!! Derived Data

Restart Xcode

Why not Clean Build Folder

  CMD+B

success!!

I have a source editor extension that has no job but to clean this clean this ;)

I have a shell alias for

  mv ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData ~ && rm -rf ~/DerivedData &

And I use it constantly. This approach is fast because it does the actual rm in the background so I can relaunch Xcode right away.

Manipulating the source code leads to invoking the Swift compiler to generate the information required to drive the rich editing experience. I have found SourceKit’s performance in complex projects, especially those where there are a lot of third-party libraries or frameworks you’re linking against, to be pretty disappointing. Especially when you’re working with many ObjC dependencies.

Like many of Apple’s developer tools, if you stick to the happy path, performance is great. Practically that means compiling your source into a single Swift module and keeping the number of modules low. If you are a “basic” iOS or macOS app with just a couple of 3p libraries things work great. Real world projects are drastically more messy...

Sounds like an unusual problem. I cannot remember having that problem and I was using Swift from the beginning.

For me Xcode is quite nice. Didn’t like AppCode. Not sure why people are so enthusiastic about it. What does it give besides better code completion? Development is a lot more than code completion.

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