Damn you Xcode | Hacker News Reader

Damn you Xcode

damnyouxcode.com

9 pointsriledhel16 comments

That seems well designed and artsy, but doesn't really tell me much about what is wrong with Xcode as it currently stands.

I'm a Visual Studio and (text editor + command line) user as far as programming goes, so could anyone describe what these problems with Xcode are? As they could also be present on other IDE's and such.

There is a "project" file, listing all the files related to the project (kind of a Makefile of Xcode). If modified externally (e.g.: by pulling changes of that file) Xcode crashes.

Well that sounds like a serious defect, stemming from the assumptions made when writing Xcode.

Though to be honest I tend to close down any IDEs that I have open when updating such files, especially if there are dozens of projects in a workspace/solution.

The main thing wrong with Xcode 4 is that it is incredibly unstable, compared to any other major IDE (Xcode 3 included).

It crashes several times every day, without fail. It also does things like bork its own project files such that they can no longer be opened, and the programmer has to roll back to an earlier version and make the changes again.

I've only started experiencing the crashiness after I upgraded to Lion. Before then, I was personally rock solid on Xcode 4.

My time in XCode makes me yearn for Visual Studio (plus resharper). Random freezing, keyboard short-cuts that suddenly stop working (no reason), and a debugger that can take minutes to move from one call to the next.

Finally, compiling .a files between the simulator and native (armv6-7). Switching is an absolute pain.

I LOVED Resharper when I was first introduced to it. Incredible piece of software. Jetbrains makes very good stuff, although they need to work on the speed.

I am one of the owners of that blog, basically we started it rant publicly about Xcode.

I think the primary problem with Xcode is that huge amount of new code has been added in recent years, and the new code has not had a chance to be thoroughly tested.

Still a better overall experience than Eclipse.

Bazing!

This doesn't really add much. As an Eclipse user I'd be interested to hear why XCode is still a better overall experience despite these problems.

The problem is that those with no taste can't tell they have no taste. It's a wicked problem. Everytime someone mentions that Eclipse sucks, an Eclipse users asks "Why" because they truly don't grok it at a deep level. I see the same thing with Opera users. But, for sake of argument, let's boil down exactly why I hate Eclipse:

- The text editor is slow. There's no reason the damn text editor should be slow.

- Too many options, many of which are such extreme edge cases they're better off being hidden in a config file.

- Eclipse wants to manage too much of your project for you. It tends to package up and write files in it's own way, which is incredibly dense and very much the "Eclipse way" of doing things.

- Workspaces? I don't care where you have my "Workspace", I'll tell you where I want to save my projects though. On a project by project basis.

- Which version of Eclipse should I download? There's like 9,001 versions.

- Eclipse runs incredibly slow on modern machines. I have 4GB of memory and a multicore processor, Xcode FLIES in comparison.

- Why is everything a plugin? EVERYTHING. Oh, you wanted to install support for <insert language here>, well there's two or four projects that do that, you have to search for them in this really crappy search screen to install their packages. Or you can download them and install them manually, you do have a PhD right?

- Eclipse can't find your java runtime without you telling it exactly where it is. This is unacceptable in 2011.

Oh god, I could go on. But I think we all get the point.

You forgot to mention that every time you install a plugin, and select a location to search through, it first downloads a list of all available plugins from the location you've selected (especially painful when you select "All available"), and then parses through that on every keystroke. "P", wait 5 seconds, "E", wait 5 seconds...you get the point.

I didn't ask for a list of things that you, personally, dislike about Eclipse, nor did I ask for you to insult me on the (mistaken) premise that your personal preferences are somehow superior to mine. I have a list of things that suck about XCode too, that does not make it inferior to Eclipse. The take-home message I got was that you are used to how XCode works and not how Eclipse works, and thus think Eclipse sucks. It's a pretty common way of thinking, but I can't say I share it. I find PHPStorm weird to use because it doesn't have workspaces, for example, but I don't think it "sucks".

Oh, and if you want to have a "who can write the longest list of reasons Eclipse sucks" competition I'm sure I could win. It has been my universal experience so far that I can explain why any program I love dearly sucks far better than anyone who dislikes it can.

my main concern is that you don't have any options to use something else.

The biggest problem with XCode? It's an IDE.

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