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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

Xcode is ok for C++ (not nearly as many features as Visual Studio on Windows, though).

I used to think that way too until I opened my project in Visual C++ (with the Visual Assist addon).

The productivity boost was so great that I've decided to never use Xcode for C++ again and do all my development in a VM if I have to.

Best alternative is Qt Creator and it's probably what I'm going to use for my next C++ project on the mac. Many people recommend CLion, but I've never really managed to actually use it (and it isn't free and runs on the jvm).

Still VC++ is a powerful tool for C++ development, which is probably quite hard to beat, so having it on the mac would make using Windows totally optional :).

VSCode is constantly improving. I haven't used Qt Creator in years, so I can't compare, but ... for my uses it is way ahead of PyCharm and WebStorm; I suspect it rivals QtCreator by now (as long as you're not writing a Qt based project)

You can write C++ in Xcode (and I do so on a daily basis), but it's pretty terrible. None of the IDE features more complicated than build-and-run actually work reliably, and the debugging experience is miserable compared to VC++.

Purists like me would do to a simple text editor (in my case Sublime) and command line tools.. Anyway.. I will give it a try... it's nice to have a competitor IDE to xCode, although they don't look like targeting the same audience.

Xcode is pretty crap for C and C++ imho. Qt Creator or CLion are light years ahead of Xcode.

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