Hacker News Reader

Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that Xcode doesn't just include the IDE, but also an entire LLVM/clang toolchain as well as SDKs and simulator OS disk images for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

It probably wouldn't hurt to split that up a bit — perhaps Xcode could install only the toolchain and macOS SDKs by default with the rest being downloadable on demand, but there's definitely a lot more going on there than just IDE/text editor. It's an all-in-one appleOS development kit.

View on HN

> SDKs and simulator OS disk images for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS

Yes, the vast majority of Xcode's size comes from inside the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms

Android Studio is better in this regard, there's an SDK manager so I don't need to have watchOS/tvOS installed when my apps don't target it

You just need the Studio that actually works, the "stable" to try stable updates, then the beta and canary versions to try out stuff that take months or even years to arrive to stable and still bork on first stable release.

I'd even (somewhat tongue in cheek) say that the text editor is the worst and least important part of Xcode. :)

(In fairness it's been improving in recent years but it's still not flexible/customizable to my TextMate taste.)

> In fairness it's been improving in recent years

Has it? In my experience, the Swift rewrite of Xcode source editing has made it vastly more buggy. I forget exactly when this happened, Xcode 8? 9?

It's definitely been improving since that initial rewrite. There's still a few rough spots, but they can be avoided almost entirely by writing idiomatic Swift — the stuff that trips SourceKit up tends to be things like nesting closures deeply and ridiculously long optional chains.

SwiftUI has done well to expose SourceKit/Xcode's weak spots. Nearly all of the performance improvements brought to both in the last major release were a result of SwiftUI applying pressure in the previous release.

I was playing with swift a few months ago on my 2016 MacBook Pro and Sourcekit sat on 100% cpu for hundreds of milliseconds whenever I typed a keystroke for some reason. There’s also a bug / horrible design choice in the macos kernel from the last couple of years where if the cpu is pegged, the computer drops keystrokes. These two bugs combined to make my computer lose keystrokes while typing function names - they came out garbled unless I purposefully typed really slowly. I was gobsmacked. It was the worst code editing experience I’ve ever had. Maybe I’m “using the wrong swift features” but it really just feels like its amateur hour at Apple. Did all the senior engineers leave in the last few years? Xcode as a whole has sort of felt like beta software since Xcode 3. Every version they fix one bug, add a headline feature and add 3 new bugs to work around. And everything gets 20% slower. It seems like they keep rushing releases out the door for wwdc then they never fix it properly afterwards.

Swift is a lovely language but the experience is thoroughly and totally ruined by Xcode. Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.

> if the cpu is pegged, the computer drops keystrokes

not only that, but ive seen bluetooth stack blow up and loose all connections to my keyboard/mouse under those circumstances as well

> Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.

its been slow since xcode 4... never really recovered from glomming interface builder into the ide

Yikes I’ve seen that bluetooth problem happen but I hadn’t connected it to cpu load. That makes total sense if it’s dropping interrupts. Maybe I should plug in my “magic” keyboard and trackpad.

I remember when Xcode 4 came out. It was slow and buggy we all thought they’d fix it over the next few releases. That just never seems to have happened. It’s a pity - for all of apple’s history of amazing UX, Microsoft’s visual studio (and vs code) are vastly better IDEs for writing software.

there are two other things i notice that seems to happen as well

1. keyboard repeats keys under high load situations

2. mouse cursor lags badly (like seconds) when switching darkmode or an external monitor...

yea, xcode just seems to be stuck in "itunes mode" where every release seems to just tweak thing but never fundamentally improve... i hope this doesnt forebear "apple music" version of xcode (starts sweating)

It is possible to install just the tool chain - brew asks you to do so if you don’t have Xcode installed.

You can just install the command line tools without having to download Xcode. It has been this way for a decade.

Did they pay for development of that toolchain or just "embraced" the open source?

Apple has been involved in the toolchain since nearly the beginning. They hired one of the original authors and sponsor its development: https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/

Not only have the paid for it, but it wouldn't likely be anything more than an academic project without Apple.

They most certainly paid for it, as well as financing many of the key contributors to related open source projects.

So not all contributors got paid? Sounds obscene given how much money they have.

Sounds like you’re not a fan of open source software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com