Comment by Arcanum-XIII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arcanum-XIII | Hacker News Reader

I developed in ObjC till 2016, so my opinion are dated but:

- Xcode is an acquired taste. A bit slow and crash prone, but most of my issues came from the frameworks. Completion and linting were good enough and the integration with dtrace was enough to help me move faster than my colleagues. I even did use Xib :D

- I tried multiple time app code: it’s not good either. In fact, I don’t like most of the jet rains product, but they’re easier to set up than the competition so….

- but now I’m back to nvim or emacs.

I don’t develop as my job anymore, so my tooling seems pretty barebone to what seems to be the trend :) I nearly make do with the Processing/Arduino IDE and they’re both horrible.

For me the biggest factors for making Xcode “happy” are:

- Writing clean/idiomatic Swift. This might sound silly but a lot of SourceKit instability is tied to things that are code smells, like deeply nesting closures and ridiculously long optional chains. Writing “Objective-C in Swift” where you’re trying your best to ignore types will also make SourceKit grumpy.

- Avoiding huge frameworks. Small focused single purpose libraries are fine, but gangly monster types can cause problems (and with UIKit available, likely unnecessary).

- Avoiding storyboards. For several years I’ve been going code-only on iOS, with XIBs being used only on macOS because there they’re more natural. Storyboards are more trouble than they’re worth on either platform.

- Using SwiftUI only for small, focused components. It still needs some time in the oven to be able to compete with code-only UIKit for speed/stability.

With those Xcode is quite snappy and reliable, allowing me to work all day with no issue.

Yeah, nobody should be using UIbuilder and storyboards any more. swiftui is so much better, faster, usable, extensible.

But wow, the hoops you jump through to use it with c++ - via obj-c (And iirc can't use .mm files either). Im sure I wasn't helping things by exposing that to javascript too :)

Xcode stability has markedly improved since 2016, FWIW.

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