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Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

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Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#111

wait until you try Android Studio...

Huh, Android Studio is amazing because it's build by people who actually know how to make software (JetBrains) and it runs everywhere.

The problems with Android Studio ist mostly caused by the underlying tech (mainly Gradle which is a massive pile of poop, and the general developer hostility of the Android SDK/NDK and related tooling), e.g. the JetBrains ancestry can be perfect but AS can still be bad (I don't share the Jetbrains enthusiasm though tbh, each time I tried any JetBrains IDE the UI was quite laggy, and the whole application takes forever to start).

But yeah, if I have the choice between Xcode and Android Studio (and generally iOS vs Android development), Xcode+iOS easily wins, and that's not because Xcode is particularly great.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#112
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look I don't wanna out-superior you but I even use flakes and HomeManager. The superiority is through the roof (along with the time it takes to update and rebuild-switch).

Real men use raw nix. I don't need those new-fangled flakes and HomeManager. Seriously though, I just never figured out the first one because I can't figure out where to start and the latter I don't really need as my home area is disposable - the data lives in a data/ partition and the dot files I care about are simply ln -s into a git repo in data/.

I'm very on the fence about HomeManager.

Typically, the functionality for managing home configs provided by raw Nix isn't good enough.

On the other hand, the functionality provided by HomeManager basically requires knowing both the package's config language and HomeManager's take on it.

There's also the fact that adding HomeManager basically gives you two ways of doing a lot of the same things. I don't find that great.

My ultimate goal is to have a single source of intent for my laptop setup, so having to manage configs separately (even as raw files) goes counter to that. I'd (very personally for this one use case) prefer my entire config to be in a single nix file without any manually composed dot files.

Flakes... I only started using because it was one of two paths to get secure boot working and I liked it better than the alternative.

Overall, I'm also very conflicted about NixOS. I liked the promises, but in practice, it falls short for me.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#113
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true for Microsoft? How they've evolved .NET and VS Code is amazing. You can make a PR on Microsoft's repos, someone actually pays attention, you get to talk and worth with Microsoft employees, and they merge things in. Microsoft is leaps and bounds more open than Google and Apple when it comes to development tooling.

Not only is dotnet development is the benchmark to aspire to (IMO), i'm not sure you could name another corporate project that comes even close. Is there a way to globally see github project activity by rank? All of dotnet is MIT. They literally have public meetings and take public notes. What other corporate project has this?

The MS dotnet debugger is not open-source - you can legally use it only with VS and VS Code (you could always give Samsung's open-source debugger a try, but it has certain limitations: https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg/issues/194#issuecommen...)

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#114
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe at Google, given how poorly Android Studio works otherwise.

That was what I had at google 8 years ago, today its not expensive at all, any serious developer should have about that. If you develop on a weak laptop then that is on you / your company, should get a proper machine. Its good if tools are fast, but in general developers are expected to have fast machines so the tools are made with that in mind.

Serious developer with US salary working at a FAANG, or SV money, you mean.

As for being serious, most of the world being a developer is an office job like any other clerk, many companies have the same computers for everyone, regardless of what they do at their desk, assuming that they still get classical desktops instead of random brand laptops.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#117
post #48

Vivado: hold my beer

Yup.

Once it took Vivado 40 minutes just to add one small Verilog file to a project. Not to compile it. Just to add it to the list of project source files, for which it scanned the file for definitions. Each time I edited the file, Vivado stalled for another 40 minutes. Same file compiled and ran all its simulation tests in Verilator (an open source tool) in a couple of seconds.

For my compiles, Vivado routinely took hours for sparse designs and over 24 hours for dense (but still conceptually small) ones. This made iteration impossible on the timescales my last FPGA project required, so I had to stop using Xilinx.

I accept that dense P&R compiles may take a long time, as it's algorithmically complex. But Vivado's occasional extremely slow and janky process for minor things left my wondering if the full P&R compile time was more due to similar bad coding issues on their side, not any real need to take that long.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#118
post #50

Apple would have been avoided by developers if they weren't part of the smartphone duopoly. The tools and processes are just that bad. Now Google has decided to make theirs even worse than Apple at least when it comes to publishing in the play store.

The sad thing is that Apple seemed more inviting to developers before they got high on the App Store cut. Every boxed Mac OS X came with a second disc containing the SDK (Xcode has always been an unstable cow, tho). They used to publish tech notes that explained how the OS works, rather than WWDC videos with high-level overviews that feel more like advertisements. Back then they've at least made attempts to use some…

Video with ELI5-level overviews that feel like an ad - these do sell. A disk with SDK does not.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#119
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more - the not caring part. But then you should try to do an app in the Android code/build/test/publish ecosystem. As someone who had/has to use both os/dev ecosystems for work, I often wondered which one is worse, and what bothered me is that I couldn't conclude. So in this great duopoly, these two tech giants constantly compete to become more and more hostile and pathetic to both the users and the…

Besides the rediculous hardware requirements of Android Studio, far beyond any other Java based IDE, we have a NDK experience that feels like a 20% side project from Android team, because back in Android 2.0 days they were forced to actually allow developers to write C and C++ code, otherwise there would be no games. Even Symbian C++ across Metrowerks and Caride, felt a much developer friendly experiece than NDK has…

I do Android development and recently upgraded my desktop as 32GB is no longer enough for Android development. I put 96GB in the new machine, and am still not fully confident that it's future proof.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#120
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is still orders of magnitude worse in every vector though. The bully everyone from users, employees, to suppliers.

The Wintel coalition was anti-competitive to an extreme degree. It may have faded to the background at this point but they were caught red handed multiple times using their market dominance to utterly destroy innovative alternatives. It doesn’t excuse Apple’s behavior, but imo they still have a long way to go to challenge the track record of MS and Intel.

All those things were done under Gates and Ballmer. When Nadella stood up on stage in his first year as CEO under a big banner that proclaimed "MS (heart) Linux", I said "I'll believe it when I see it." Well, over the next decade or so, I saw it, and now I believe it. Microsoft under Nadella just plain behaves differently (and much better) than they used to behave under Gates and Ballmer.
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