As much as I like Swift, the tooling has been and still is subpar. Swift package management is barely viable.
You have to use Xcode. You can try other IDEs but LSP equivalent features are at the most basic level. Xcode is the kitchen sink of IDEs which has led to many negative opinions as it struggles under its own weight. Every other year there’s new UI for things like debugging which is fine but what would be really nice is if the actual debugging worked. Technically there are reasons why you can’t print a local variable sometimes when stepping through a program, but in practice, I do not care and I want to know what the value is.
If you don’t care about the “optional” tooling like the dependency manager and LSP or a linter (which is closer to ESLint versus Rust Analyzer), the required tooling leaves much to be desired. The compiler sometimes gives up when it takes too much time to process a complex type. It would be understandable in some cases but most people encounter the problem when just writing seemingly simple SwiftUI. Error messages and auto fix-it suggestions are improving but still disappointing. I remember when Apple switched from GCC to LLVM and everyone was praising the error messages as a reason to switch.
Swift is actually ambitious. The generics system is world class. It has to support the legacy of a huge ecosystem on multiple platforms. SwiftUI is one of those bets that you might be surprised that Apple can still make. But whenever I fire up that SwiftUI Preview, I am crossing my fingers that maybe I’ll see something instead of an error. Swift lives up to its name in terms of moving quickly and the language design is probably fine, but outside of that, the tooling is still very immature for a decade old language which tons of resources are invested in.
this has been my experience as well. After being one of the five people who liked using Objective-C I was eager to have this new, incredible language to work with, and pushed to adopt it as soon as reasonable on all the codebases I worked with.
That enthusiasm has since waned when stuff happened like compilation times slowing to a crawl because somebody used ternaries extensively. I still think it's a great language, but the tooling really makes it hard to love
You have to use Xcode. You can try other IDEs but LSP equivalent features are at the most basic level. Xcode is the kitchen sink of IDEs which has led to many negative opinions as it struggles under its own weight. Every other year there’s new UI for things like debugging which is fine but what would be really nice is if the actual debugging worked. Technically there are reasons why you can’t print a local variable sometimes when stepping through a program, but in practice, I do not care and I want to know what the value is.
If you don’t care about the “optional” tooling like the dependency manager and LSP or a linter (which is closer to ESLint versus Rust Analyzer), the required tooling leaves much to be desired. The compiler sometimes gives up when it takes too much time to process a complex type. It would be understandable in some cases but most people encounter the problem when just writing seemingly simple SwiftUI. Error messages and auto fix-it suggestions are improving but still disappointing. I remember when Apple switched from GCC to LLVM and everyone was praising the error messages as a reason to switch.
Swift is actually ambitious. The generics system is world class. It has to support the legacy of a huge ecosystem on multiple platforms. SwiftUI is one of those bets that you might be surprised that Apple can still make. But whenever I fire up that SwiftUI Preview, I am crossing my fingers that maybe I’ll see something instead of an error. Swift lives up to its name in terms of moving quickly and the language design is probably fine, but outside of that, the tooling is still very immature for a decade old language which tons of resources are invested in.