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> Can you sensibly develop in Swift with anything else besides Xcode?

JetBrains makes a fully-featured IDE for Objective-C and Swift. https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

It's a fine IDE, just like all their IDEs. But last time I used it for some Swift/SwiftUI, it still required to have Xcode installed.

Do you mean Swift? Or perhaps you mean iOS development since you mention SwiftUI?

SwiftUI works on macOS, too. [0]

[0] https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-mac...

SwiftUI, the frameworks, is not part of Swift, the language. You can happily use Swift without SwiftUI, or an Apple OS/hardware.

We use AppCode (JetBrains) with server-side Swift and had to install XCode to get it to work.

I can't recall why it's necessary, but the first step in our developer onboarding README is "Install XCode, even though we don't use it"

FWIW our team has found JetBrains pretty fantastic for Swift. An important caveat of that being that we make a database product that runs on linux -- not a MacOS / iOS app that would benefit from all the special features of XCode. My guess is if that's your jam, XCode is the only high-productivity game in town.

It's probably the build-chain that comes with Xcode that requires the installation. You can probably do it yourself, but it'll be a bigger hassle.

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