161–170 of 348 posts
I wonder how much of the recent Apple OS releases were done with "agentic coding".
According to Mark Gurman (Bloomberg Apple beat reporter), Apple “runs on Claude.” https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199?s=61
Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.
Honest question. I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch. Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day. What is so horrible about XCode?
Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working.
Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone.
Xcode likes to sometimes recompile files that haven't changed slowing everything down, sometimes significantly depending on the file. No idea why.
It can get very confused if you're missing a parenthesis in the wrong place in a SwiftUI View leading to opaque swift compiler errors about code being too complex.
Even mildly complex use of a swift #Predicate will cause an error about it being too complex forcing you to break them down into smaller pieces and even then it takes far too long to build even on a brand new machine.
The simulators are quite slow to start/update/run and xcode sometimes fails to shut them down completely when quitting leading to them just continually running eating memory unless you kill the processes manually.
The simulators also are really limited in their functionality. No background processes, spotlight, network degradation simulation, out of memory killer, etc.
The profiler sometimes just fails to start an app correctly, immediately ending a run forcing you to close the profiler and reopen it again before it'll start working.
Symbol refactor (rename) can be painfully slow where the UI just locks up until it can find all the references.
Xcode likes to duplicate package dependencies in xcodeproj. It just creates new hashes for the same library and adds it as a dependency over and over again, so when the link phase happens, it adds libraries repeatedly over and over and over again unless you manually clear them out. Not sure what causes this, perhaps updating the version or merges between users.
Why is it still called Xcode, if they abandoned the name OS X?
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First time I tried it, I realised there is no way to have a terminal emulator panel. A bloody terminal . Like the most basic feature you could integrate into an IDE. No thank you.
I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ? Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used…
MacOS has very very slow slow window- and desktop- switching (over one FULL second to switch from one desktop to another - this is not a joke!) so having a terminal integrated into the same application is very useful for maintaining flow for users developing on a single-screen Macbook.
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Honest question. I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch. Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day. What is so horrible about XCode?
Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating. First, the performance is just bad . The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day. The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me…
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Honest question. I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch. Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day. What is so horrible about XCode?
My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway. Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application s…
This is so you can see function names for system frameworks. You can step into them if you want too even if Xcode tries to stop you doing it by default.
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I think one thing that shows Apple's position towards open source in general is that they don't allow their employees to work on open source projects in their own time and using their own equipment. Before anyone brings up that California labor code provision, it has a carve-out for "activities that relate to the employer's business". Since Apple is big enough and has their fingers in enough pies that they can credib…
I don't think this is it. I can only find one tweet from an Apple employee who said that they can't work on OSS and was looking for new maintainers. I am not sold that this is the whole truth. I think the bigger issue is contributing to OSS for putting Linux on a Macbook for example could be considered leaking company secrets since you would have access to internals. I find it hard to believe that Apple would go afte…
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I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates? As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive. I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools. This has driven me to madness too.
They are the same Info.plist format as every other MacOS application.
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I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ? Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used…
I come from Linux land so I'm used to things being lightning fast, so using software on a Mac requires a thousand workarounds. A terminal integrated into the IDE is one of those necessary workarounds. MacOS has very very slow slow window- and desktop- switching (over one FULL second to switch from one desktop to another - this is not a joke!) so having a terminal integrated into the same application is very useful fo…
Window switching is instantaneous though, and I do that a lot
OT: Rant Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic. Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind. Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch. I just want to look at a text f…