Live data from Hacker News

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

holdtherobot.com

141–150 of 155 posts

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

#141

That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause. I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to crit…

Dunno. Not sure you can so easily slice off Swift as "outside of XCode", since it isn't used by anything else and is basically required for any Apple development, and only Apple development.

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

#142
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Google just matching Apple with the signing and notarization bullshit? Except Google is free?

Yes, but this doesn't mean we should put up with it. After this comes into effect in 2027 or so, you won't be able to install an app on your Google-certified phone without Google knowing, just like on iOS. What happened to user control?

Oh I know and I absolutely hate it. I can't think of a good argument for these changes. They're just not worse than what has always prevented me from owning IOS devices

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's not that bad imo and the profiling tools are amazing.

The profiling tools come from solaris

That is not true. You can’t even run DTrace on Apple Silicon without disabling SIP, yet Instruments runs fine.

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

#145
It’s horrible but also kind of so good. The bugs are absolutely horrendous, swift is an abomination, the menus are completely impossible to figure out, the builds are wacky. But I’ll be damned, SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks.

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

#146
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.

Microsoft's developer relations are highly variable: they are great in some areas (C# and .NET Core continue to be fantastic, Visual Studio's debugger is second to none, going back to gdb after it is like banging rocks together to make fire), and awful in others (if I want to write a GUI application in Windows, what should I do to be on the idiomatic happy path? Microsoft: shrug , try one of these half-dozen half-bak…

This has been my experience as well. All code that doesn't need a UI feels good to write, but as soon as you try to make anything that doesn't run in the console you are met with so much boilerplate and bad tooling that I start dreading waking up.

I've had to make a couple of side projects for my company and I've tried WPF, Blazor, MAUI, and Winforms.

Blazor is the best out of all of these but even it has tedious boilerplate and unintuitive state handling.

MVVM makes WPF and Winforms a hassle, and customizing the looks of components is a nightmare, where some seemingly universal attributes will either get misapplied or outright ignored.

MAUI is a nightmare to work with. Cross compilation is both slow and opaque which makes it impossible to debug and since you are interfacing with the xcode compiler as well you are forced to debug using divine inspiration and hoping it works. We tried to make an RTC AR POC app a while back and it took me 2 weeks of trying different ways to make iirc arkit or webrtc to compile with dotnet and the result was us giving up and just making the iOS version in swift/using xcode instead. I think this is why I still have fond memories of xcode because despite all of its flaws it was noticeably better than trying to cross compile an iOS app from dotnet

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

#147
post #145

It’s horrible but also kind of so good. The bugs are absolutely horrendous, swift is an abomination, the menus are completely impossible to figure out, the builds are wacky. But I’ll be damned, SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks.

How is swift an abomination? I liked it a lot in my short time with it.

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

#148
post #25
post #9

Amen. I am thankful everyday that IntelliJ is used for Android Studio

Android Studio is what made me hate InteliJ, and keep with Eclipse/Netbeans unless forced otherwise by project delivery team.

Why? Android Studio seems fine, IntelliJ does a very good job on their IDE

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

#149

Could some Xcode uers explain to me why AppCode (IntelliJ IDE) did not take off as an Xcode replacement? I recently had to do some iOS work, knew that Xcode sucks, wanted to try AppCode, only to learn that it was discontinued because of lack of interest.

AppCode was unfortunately extremely limited. Lagged behind Swift versions. No editor for Storyboards/XIBs back when they were ubiquitous, and no preview for SwiftUI. Debugging app extensions or anything that isn't the standard "iOS app" was generally flaky or outright not supported.

There is a lot of interest as IntelliJ is a good IDE, but AppCode just wasn't reaching the bare minimum required to have me not use or worry about Xcode.

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

#150
post #145

It’s horrible but also kind of so good. The bugs are absolutely horrendous, swift is an abomination, the menus are completely impossible to figure out, the builds are wacky. But I’ll be damned, SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks.

How is swift an abomination? I liked it a lot in my short time with it.

They should have created a systems language to replace objective C and an easy language like Python or JavaScript for app dev, instead they created a language that tries to do everything and the result is a mess. For example SwiftUI, UIkit, you’re constantly running up against weird type system errors and compiler errors. Like dude I’m trying to make a list, swift will say “no you can’t make a list there and I’m not sure why”
Post reply on HN