One has a top-notch IDE from a top-notch IDE vendor. The other has XCode.
Also, ARC aside, for the 3-4 items you mentioned, either Kotlin also also has them, or has just as good alternatives. And none of those are life-changing. ARC vs a good GC is just a different tradeoff (no cycle detection vs pauses, etc).
I'm sure you can find some things where Swift is better at, and others where Kotlin is. But not that many to proclare one or the other the definite winner, and surely not a major one.
> Xcode isn't perfect, but it's way better than JetBrains.
O_o Are you kidding me?
People whinge all the time about jetbrains subscriptions, but I've literally never spoken to someone who's actually used their products and think that the alternative editors available (visual studio, xcode, etc) are actually better.
There are some features like UI designers that you can't do without, but it's been a long time since I met anyone who actually liked xcode.
I tried AppCode to write in objc on mac and it felt way less transparent and smooth than Xcode. Idk if Xcode is missing some features, but all my real issues probably exist in different planes. My Xcode inconvenience points are: case-insensitive completion sometimes gets in my way, as it is with single lettered variables; it is easy to break constraints for non-trivial xib. I can live with both. What is it for you, in short?
I've attempted to use IntelliJ for javascript/typescript (React, Node.js) and Elixir. I've found myself continually going back to VSCode or other editors. Especially for the front-end ecosystem, VSCode's intellisense, syntax highlighting and plugin support blows everyone else out of water IMO.
I use IntelliJ/Android Studio for Java, and that's about it.
Yes, yes, and yes, plus Jetbrain IDEs have much superior code assistance and navigation compared to Xcode. Xcode is clearly worse than Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse, and many other IDEs I've used over the past 20 years in the industry when it comes to code navigation, refactoring, and basic editing. Xcode does only one thing well and that's interface builder, but if you were writing a backend application with no UI would you choose Xcode? I'd rank it lower than emacs and vim for editing tasks.
Otoh, my colleagues were surprised seeing easy and good-looking two-panel diff and blame right in Xcode. Analyzis build (one that shows blue arrows for how we can get into trouble) was surprise too. It seems that preference depends on use cases and two products can differ in different ways, not only as superior vs. regular.
I never did anything in VS though, cause its interface always turned me 180 after first run. And I can write Makefile and .gvimrc from scratch much faster than it installs itself.
Refactoring is a dream with JetBrains. But it is very language dependent, with Java having most support. Haven't used Kotlin in Intellij so I don't know how well Kotlin is supported, though I imagine rather well given that it their own language.
I use PyCharm and refactoring works pretty well there too. Also I really like having an IDE that runs and presents itself just the same on all big three platforms, since I'm always hopping between computers.
Also, ARC aside, for the 3-4 items you mentioned, either Kotlin also also has them, or has just as good alternatives. And none of those are life-changing. ARC vs a good GC is just a different tradeoff (no cycle detection vs pauses, etc).
I'm sure you can find some things where Swift is better at, and others where Kotlin is. But not that many to proclare one or the other the definite winner, and surely not a major one.