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Comment by deze333 | Hacker News Reader

Not my experience at all. I develop daily in Xcode and compile times are excellent. One can't really compare between TS/JS interpreted languages and machine code generation. Apples and oranges. Swift compiler is fast, faster than C++. In my experience the Golang compiler is the fastest but the language is much simpler. Rust compiler is slower than C++.

As a side note, for some reason people like to bitch Xcode just out of habit perhaps. It's a kind of base line statement. Not my experience either. It's an excellent IDE for the current year of 2025. Helps me a lot and I build end-user facing apps, the proof is the love that users give to my apps. In other words, I have skin in the game.

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The compile times are ok, but slower than Rust and C++ in my personal experience. What I was referring to with "compile time issues" is the occasional type resolution issue that hangs the compiler for seconds/minutes, and requires some refactoring to mitigate. This does happen a lot less with Swift 6 than it did with 1-4 though.

I've used a lot of IDEs, and spend plenty of time using XCode. It's the worst I've used by far, and the only one where I feel it necessary to edit the majority of code in a separate editor.

Writing apps that people love makes you a good developer, but says little about the tools you use.

Sometimes people mistake Swift for Xcode and vice versa. If compiler can't figure out type in reasonable time, give it some room to breathe by adding a clarifying type definition. I don't like to fight the compiler trying to bend it to my will. I am happy to offer extra help by clarifying types – magic costs performance. Compiler gives back by blazingly fast builds.

By the way, I am impressed by speed of Swift 6 project builds on Apple Silicon Macs. My non-trivial apps using a mix of Swift/C++/C files (hundreds and hundreds) get compiled in nearly real time. Feels good.

Mistaking Swift for XCode isn't the issue here. Swift is great, I'm just pointing out the issues I've had with it in large projects.

> ...give it some room to breathe by adding a clarifying type definition

Right, but that's the problem - it's the only language I've used where this is something you have to worry about, and it's not like the type system is more powerful. And often, the issues stem from external libraries outside my control. Better compiler errors would help mitigate the issue.

There's a lot to like about Swift, but I also think it's productive to identify the parts that compare unfavorably to other languages.

Xcode regularly crashes and/or ends up leaving garbage in its garbage xml files. The un-reviewable xml stuff is also a garbage of its own making. The build system is intractable. Xcode does not lend itself to segregating builds from dependency fetching, i.e. do all the internet things on one machine and donthe building on a different one. The debugger cocks out at least weekly. Sure, you can make goods app with it. We’ve been making good apps with less for decades too. Other platforms/editors are not as painful, it is as simple as that.

How interesting! Xcode very rarely crashes on me. I don't know why but it seems to work 99.9% of time the way I expect it to work. Its build system makes sense to me. Of course, it differs from other build systems but that's life, I am flexible and can learn things. Just saying.

The only thing XML Xcode generates are storyboards and xibs (and schemes also). All of those XMLs are readable. Xcode’s build system is very reasonable (though different than on other IDEs, but that does not mean bad!).

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