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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with Apple developer tools?

Every now and then something annoying will happen, like the Simulator sucking all the resources for no apparent reason, Xcode crashing/declining to compile some SwiftUI View because the code is too complex and the download size of Xcode used to be gargantuan but all these are really annoyances and nothing catastrophic. Definitely not case of not paying attention to details, on the contrary - Xcode does lot's of small things to increase developer comfort, which IMHO is about paying attention to details.

What do you think it can happen if you let Xcode cloud access your online git repo and compile the project on their machines? What should I be worried about?

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Never used Xcode as anything other than a dependency for other dev stuff and in that case it's huge, takes ages to install, doesn't clean itself after installation and easily fills 50-100 gigabytes with useless "simulators" that has no relevance for most.

> doesn't clean itself after installation and easily fills 50-100 gigabytes with useless "simulators" that no one seems to understand why is needed for most devs.

Not the case anymore, Go to Settings->General->Storage in macOS where you can manage the storage space. If you tap on the "i" next to the "Developer", you will be given option to delete caches, indexes, iOS device support(which can be huge).

Perform a sacred voodoo dance (you need to find its instructions somewhere under the sea, the map of the location is hidden in the highest mountains, you need to ask a big foot of its whereabouts). It’s very aesthetically pleasing though, if you’ll ever find it. Welcome to the wonder— Apple land.

Nothing sacred or secret, its under the menu where you manage your storage.

I was just mocking the way Apple hides some things in their interface, e.g. their ‘Search this page’

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625718

Interesting, based on this comment, I deleted ~20GB of simulators (~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator). Thanks for that!

I can recommend the app GrandPerspective to find files like these sitting around.

Try build your swift packages with vscode, you'll thank me later. Integration with spm is so bad i could only find the path problem i had with vscode. Xcode would show me completely obscure message, probably because it was trying to do something smart that only partially worked.

Xcode is utter crap. It's sluggish, its window and history management is nonsense, it crashes every day, every new version brings its new batch of weird build errors.

Honestly i can't believe this company owns the whole stack down to the hardware and manages to release such a poor product.

There’s this hate for Xcode that I see popping up every once in a while, often times by non-native devs.

I honestly don’t get it. I’ve tried everything under the sun and Xcode is by far my favorite IDE.

It’s intuitive, fast and is getting more and more QoL improvements that are much appreciated.

Is it annoying at times? Yeah sure, there are some running jokes between me and a bunch of other indie devs, but it’s mostly in jest.

I can’t recall the last time I ran into an actual issue that ate up my time and was a showstopper.

Perhaps it’s a matter of preference, because the no 1 suggestion by the haters, VSC, is something I personally hate. Unintuitive as hell and yet another addition to the Electron Hall of Shame.

There was a time period when Xcode was truly awful: incredibly slow, crashed often, the syntax highlighter kept crashing so you’d be editing code with no syntax coloring forget autocompletion or diagnostics. I’m glad AppCode existed at this point because it was basically unusable.

I believe this dark point was when Swift came out, up to 2.0 or 3.0. They definitely rushed it and I believe rushed a lot of other features into Xcode.

But otherwise, Xcode in the early days was great, and Xcode today is great. I suspect most of the haters are remembering the bad times. Or maybe they have an old computer, and Apple software is known for being slow on older devices (“planned obsolescence”, I think Apple just adds bloat to their software when they develop faster hardware because they don’t notice). Or maybe they are complaining because Xcode is ridiculously large (it requires like 40GB free space to install) and does weird stuff when installing, there are probably issues you can run into with certain system configurations (particularly with, again, older systems). Or maybe we’re spoiled by good IDEs (even VSCode is fast despite being Electron, I still prefer JetBrains and AppCode).

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