I'm outing myself as actually, mostly, liking Xcode (as a "mostly C/C++ cross-platform coder", haven't dabbled much with the interface builder side of things).
But some things really need to be fixed:
- Downloads are getting way too big, and most of this is all the platform SDKs. Those SDKs should be removed from the initial download and instead installed when actually needed or with an integrated "package manager". As it is now, I'm just using 3 (iPhoneOS, iPhoneOSSimulator and MacOSX) of the 7 installed SDKs, the other 4 SDKs (2x AppletTVOS and 2x WatchOS) are just dead weight.
- Don't know how it's in Swift, but starting for the first time into the debugger takes 5..10 seconds, even on my new 14"MBP, and even for trivial programs. This used to be instant a couple of years ago, but then got worse over time.
- The debugger's variable view panel is way too bare bones, and doesn't seem to have been improved much in the last two decades.
- "Schemes"... 'nuff said.
- Something needs to be done about the extension/plugin ecosystem (e.g. there is none, just a handful of extensions in the app store), look at Visual Studio Code for inspiration.
Also, I'm not sure what the "new build system" is about, but from my point of view it didn't really improve anything over the old build system. Maybe the resources should instead have been spent on something that actually benefits users.
Plenty of good stuff too:
- The clang static analyzer integration with the 'arrow visualization' is brilliant.
- AFAIK it was the first IDE to integrate ASAN, TSAN and UBSAN easy enough to use "for the rest of us".
- Probably also the first IDE with realtime memory usage visualization, Visual Studio only got this in VS2015 if I remember right.
But some things really need to be fixed:
- Downloads are getting way too big, and most of this is all the platform SDKs. Those SDKs should be removed from the initial download and instead installed when actually needed or with an integrated "package manager". As it is now, I'm just using 3 (iPhoneOS, iPhoneOSSimulator and MacOSX) of the 7 installed SDKs, the other 4 SDKs (2x AppletTVOS and 2x WatchOS) are just dead weight.
- Don't know how it's in Swift, but starting for the first time into the debugger takes 5..10 seconds, even on my new 14"MBP, and even for trivial programs. This used to be instant a couple of years ago, but then got worse over time.
- The debugger's variable view panel is way too bare bones, and doesn't seem to have been improved much in the last two decades.
- "Schemes"... 'nuff said.
- Something needs to be done about the extension/plugin ecosystem (e.g. there is none, just a handful of extensions in the app store), look at Visual Studio Code for inspiration.
Also, I'm not sure what the "new build system" is about, but from my point of view it didn't really improve anything over the old build system. Maybe the resources should instead have been spent on something that actually benefits users.
Plenty of good stuff too:
- The clang static analyzer integration with the 'arrow visualization' is brilliant.
- AFAIK it was the first IDE to integrate ASAN, TSAN and UBSAN easy enough to use "for the rest of us".
- Probably also the first IDE with realtime memory usage visualization, Visual Studio only got this in VS2015 if I remember right.
- The Metal debugger.