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Comment by tmpX7dMeXU | Hacker News Reader

If Apple was compelled to support a first-class iOS development experience on Windows, all this would do is immovably stunt the continued improvement of iOS development on macOS. There is a material degree of OS integration / cooperation in IOS development with Xcode. If Apple released a second-class development experience I’ve no doubt that you’d spare no time in making similar insinuations that it’s some sort of artificial constraint.

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Xcode and iOS Simulator on other platforms would involve porting AppKit as well as writing all-new Darwin virtualization for those platforms. Xcode is thoroughly a Mac native app, and the iOS/watchOS/tvOS/etc simulators currently just run the respective userlands on top of the underpinnings that macOS shares with other Apple platforms.

It'd be rather similar to the situation with Docker, where Xcode and the simulators would run markedly better on macOS than on other platforms due to fewer layers being necessary. Developing for iOS on Windows or Linux would technically be possible but it wouldn't be very pleasant.

XCode is a hog, if there was a supported way to develop applications without it, that would be a first class experience.

like the xcode cli tools. all th e basic tools are there.

This is more than accurate. I wanted to start iOS development, but even opening Xcode is painful.

Been using Xcode since 2012 and I think it's great. It has it's flaws, sure, but overall I think it's a really good development experience. What do you dislike about it?

I've been using it since it was known as Project Builder and also don't have many complaints. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. I spend plenty of time in the IntelliJ-based Android Studio and haven't found it to be much of an improvement (and in fact, find that its "smarts" get in the way as often as they help).

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