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Comment by elpakal | Hacker News Reader

Great article, very cool to read. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s time for Apple to provide its developers with a pure Swift IDE - all of my CLI apps and anything Swift server related always end up working a lot easier in CLion (which I happily pay for). I have to use Xcode for my day job and man does it seem bloated (call me old but the new GitHub code review feature is completely unusable IMHO). And storyboards? Don’t get me started.

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> But I can’t help but wonder if it’s time for Apple to provide its developers with a pure Swift IDE

You mean an IDE only for Swift or only written in Swift? That last few projects I worked on that involved Swift all had some Obj-C or C++ components, so no matter what I would really like support for other languages in an IDE they offer.

I meant only for Swift but I wrote the comment while walking and on my phone, I’m sure I forgot to think about some things.

You might be happy with something like VSCode + sourcekit-lsp once that combo gets more mature.

If they do my guess is it will be in the cloud.

>And storyboards? Don’t get me started.

Does anybody use them?

Why CLion and not AppCode which seems more suited to the task ?

Only because of a JetBrains license I get through work

I'm no swift wizard but I gave it a run. I was able to build a simple app with ease, but AppCode still requires XCode to be installed on the machine since it uses the same toolchain (Example: Simulator is used).

Sounds like you’ll enjoy Swift Playgrounds.

I got the impression that Swift Playgrounds was really Xcode in the background with most of the UI hidden. It certainly didn't feel snappy to me when I last tried it.

I’m not sure how to respond to “really Xcode in the background” but it’s an app with an entirely new codebase (that Xcode now shares some code with) and a full toolchain. If you haven’t tried the latest version released recently you should give it a try, it’s much improved from what we had in the past.

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