191–200 of 211 posts
I really don't know what Apple gets out of keeping XCode as closed source. Why not open it up?
There's always non-zero work involved with open-sourcing stuff. How would Apple benefit from this move?
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Indeed, Apple has the high-tech equivalent of "dragon sickness", in a nod to Tolkien. Google has a long road ahead of it, but it looks like they have the right pieces in place where I see small, incremental improvements each year, so maybe they're the tortoise. Milestones on that long road are like migrate away from Dalvik, fix business model / monetization issues with the Android marketplace, switch to vector-based…
> Imagine if you could hook up your own Docker container that Google's build infrastructure then taps to build your Android app...but all the open source your app depends upon are in their build infrastructure, with near-instant feedback on build and CI problems of the open source bits operating at a massive scale. But... why? Gradle already does a good job eliminating works-on-my-machine-isms, that sounds like cloud…
Github for build and continuous delivery/deployment/integration; extremely distributed build. Today an app developer pulls down the latest version of an open source library and building against it, then files any integration issues against the library's ticketing system. Google's system allows the library developer to build a version, then find everyone whose apps that use their library break because of the new proposed version. It vastly speeds up the delivery cycle and increases robustness between builds of all your dependencies and your app.
A lot of people really like the re-factoring and IntelliSense features in Visual Studio, but hate working under Windows. The new Linux compatibility push under Windows when it matures may accomplish the same as making Linux a first-class citizen in Visual Studio.
Google trying to further develop Dalvik/Android Runtime for Android seems to me eerily like Sun developing further generations of SPARC. Google would have to put up a really big war chest to continually find and address all the edge cases to sustain a process virtual machine going forward into the future, and I'm not clear where the value proposition lies in doing so, rather than settling upon an existing process virtual machine with more developers working upon it. I suspect Google does this because adopting someone else's process virtual machine, even an open sourced one, risks that someone else somehow strategically chokepointing Android development in the future with incompatible changes.
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Not only autocomplete, but syntax highlighting as well. SourceKit seems to crash with every moderately complex expression.
SourceKit crashes are caused by bugs in the Swift type checker most of the time; it's not SourceKit itself that's at fault usually. We did a lot of work to fix architectural problems in 3.1, especially with generics, and there will be more improvements in 4.0. It's definitely a priority now that the language design has settled down.
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Why isn't brew good enough?
Homebrew is rather limited in what it can control, i.e. in Linux almost everything is under the control of your package manager, there's no tracking, updates roll faster if you're on something like Arch and the overall user interface makes more sense. I've also found that homebrew packages sometimes don't contain the necessary header files for development, (i.e. imagemagick), so you're forced to switch to MacPorts ju…
It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.
These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.
I'm honestly curious what makes it sound immature though. Could you elaborate?
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> Yea, but iOS developers make twice as much as Android developers. 1) 2x mouse nuts is still mouse nuts. 2) Do they really make 2x? Especially after you deduct $100 a year?
$100 is peanuts to anyone actually earning money, and it's definitely peanuts compared to developer cost.
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Yeah :/... I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode even though we all know how bad it is... there are so many alternative toolsets you can use, including just vim+git+make, that are just so much more stable and easier to customize to get the optimal testing workflow, that to sit around and smash your head against Xcode over and over again while constantly complaini…
> I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode > there are so many alternative toolsets you can use Actually no, if you want the latest, most supported tools, frameworks APIs etc. you have to use Xcode. Most of us don't want to use Xcode, but we also don't want to use C#, (Swift is actually very nice), which IS NOT a native solution.
See http://continuous.codes/ for an example of what can be done with F# and Xamarin.
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Yeah :/... I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode even though we all know how bad it is... there are so many alternative toolsets you can use, including just vim+git+make, that are just so much more stable and easier to customize to get the optimal testing workflow, that to sit around and smash your head against Xcode over and over again while constantly complaini…
> I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode > there are so many alternative toolsets you can use Actually no, if you want the latest, most supported tools, frameworks APIs etc. you have to use Xcode. Most of us don't want to use Xcode, but we also don't want to use C#, (Swift is actually very nice), which IS NOT a native solution.
You can do all of this at the command line without having to use Xcode. All Xcode is doing is running a bunch of command line applications to accomplish what it does... it isn't some kind of evil magic, it is just a project manager; so close that broken IDE that is Xcode and write some makefiles: you can use the same iPhone SDK and use the same compilers and the same programming languages can you can build .apps and codesign things for distribution via the App Store and never once touch Xcode. I'm working on a project right now that uses app extensions and special entitlements and all kinds of crazy up-to-the-latest iOS magic, and I'm not using Xcode: you can too; it isn't even like it is complicated, and so I continue to have absolutely no sympathy.