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Comment by imd23 | Hacker News Reader

xCode today is and extremely sophisticated IDE. I think there's no other software more complex than it that is so well designed to maintain simplicity, ease of use and speed. It was ultra slow years before, but nowadays every time I develop for Android I'd kill for having an xCode like realtime autocomplete and documentation. XCode it's extremely solid and you feel it every time you use it. Android Studio is build on Java, then it's slow and the UI is nowhere near as polished as Xcode. If I were Google I'd start coding my own IDE from zero ASAP.

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Your comment tells me you haven't used Android Studio at all, and are making up attributes based on what you assume something written in Java must be.

I use Jetbrains IDEs and Xcode every day. Whenever I have to write any significant amount of code, I switch from Xcode to Appcode.

> I'd kill for having an xCode like realtime autocomplete and documentation

From my experience, this is true for Jetbrains IDEs, and not for Xcode, particularly for autocomplete. Xcode autocomplete is a pain, and sometimes gets in the way instead of being actually helpful.

I am sorry to disappoint you. I wrote a huge app in Java and in Kotlin. Months of develoments. xCode still years ahead of AS in every sense. Inheriting another company IDE is philosophically wrong, but that's the way Android and Google work. Maybe I love details too much.

So, given that IntelliJ IDEA has been in development for 14 years and XCode for 11, when would you expect Google to release a high-quality IDE if they started from scratch today?

This is a subjective issue, of course. Personally I find autocomplete and navigation in Xcode still sorely lacking compared to IDEs in the Intellij family, to the point where I happily pay for AppCode to do most of my iOS work (basically any serious coding, although I return to Xcode for UI work). I will concede the AppCode can be sluggish at times, though, which is my major gripe. Conversely I find Xcode more buggy: every other version seems to be plagued with crashing bugs.

As for the idea that Google should start from scratch: that would just put them back a decade. I'm very glad they decided to build on an existing great platform instead.

Java/Swing is slow is a myth due to badly written applications. Jetbrains does it right. My main machine is a little 11" MacBook and I use AppCode/IntelliJ all day long without performance issues. I use XCode for Interface Builder as the code crafting abilities of the editor are primitive in comparison. I do agree that everything integrates nicely, and it's great to just jump in as a newbie, but I miss solid refactoring, code navigation, smart template and multiple cursors the most when I occasionally use it. I can see the evidence when I start on an existing codebase - typo's, misnamed methods that have evolved to something else etc. Things that AppCode does trivially, and with full trust are things that XCode users seem to balk at as one never knows if the build will break. Maybe things have improved over time (I've used AppCode for 2+ years now), but the evidence in existing code tells me otherwise.

From someone who uses both daily, this is far from the truth, and I can only conclude that you have not used Android Studio in your day job.

XCode is fine for what it is, and its strength is the tool integrations. For everything else like actually editing and refactoring code it is worlds behind something like Intellij/Android Studio.

If Google does anything, they need to build/buy a simulator (Genymotion for example) instead of the emulator.

> xCode-like realtime autocomplete and documentation

XCode's autocomplete is a joke compared to Android Studio's -- a strongly typed & non-dynamic language does wonders for how efficiently & accurately an IDE can fill in your dots for you.

I am sorry but AS autocomplete takes seconds to appear on my rMBP. xCode flies. I write methods and I see the docs on the right. I can cntrl+click and see the full docs. Let's not talk about the Quality of the Apple docs compared to android's, or debugging and instruments tools.

> takes seconds to appear on my rMBP

seconds is far too long... That you're even trying to argue that autocomplete is more powerful in XCode than AS shows you haven't used AS for more than maybe a minute. I've used both side by side for years (well, Eclipse and IntelliJ before AS), and it's honestly not even close. XCode takes longer and consistently suggests functions not available on my object, or classes I never use. XCode is great at plenty of things, but autocomplete is its #1 weakness.

> I can cntrl+click and see the full docs

And in AS I can Cmd+Click and see the source..

> debugging

debugging live running apps w/o having to launch from the IDE is awesome. And I don't think there's a single debugging feature that XCode has that AS doesn't. Seeing as Obj-C is a dynamic language, the console REPL is pretty nice, but that's a language feature more than an IDE feature.

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