Works, and has potential. But disappoints, and is frankly worst among modern development experiences
2
By Chase Guru
There’s a few good things about Xcode, and it’s not a scam. No ads or purchases (obviously), it does what it’s supposed to. Swift and SwiftUI have a lot of good ideas. That’s where the good things end. In practice, XCode is the buggiest piece of software I regularly interact with - frequently needing restarts, or manual build cache clear, or getting into a weird state - or it’ll just crash. Which is honestly probably doing me a favor, since it needs so many restarts anyway. I don’t have the same level of instability with Android Studio, VSCode, or any other IDE I’ve ever used. Swift/SwiftUI is a good modern reactive framework; however, it’s designed in a way that the tooling struggles, so if you do something wrong you might just get an error “can’t process file in a reasonable time” after building for like 40 seconds, and it’s because you messed up an argument to a function when in any other modern language, it would give you an error about your argument type nearly immediately. There’s also many common things that require a lot of boiler plate. View modifiers for example are most often used via an extension method on view, but then you end up writing parameters for the modifier itself, as well as the extension nearly doubling the line count to do a single thing. Apple does a lot to increase quality of life of their Views, ex. Text nicely handles LocalizedStringKeys versus variable type strings. But if you want to do a similar thing, you learn it’s a ton of boiler plate. I’m glad apple made their views easy to use, but they didn’t make it easy for us to make OUR views easy to use. We can do the same thing they did, but it requires duplicated constructors with special @ modifiers or whatever, and if this is in a more complex view with more parameters, then adding/removing parameters becomes a massive chore. Previews are another great idea, that are executed poorly or don’t work as well as you would hope, and I was excited to learn you can use Previews with UIKit views, but I can’t figure out how to get them to refresh except by starting a build, then resuming the preview and waiting. I also was excited to hear that there is now AI autocomplete stuff, and my new $3,000 Mac mini supports it, but despite having it enabled in settings, and the models installed, I haven’t seen suggestions since the first day I got Xcode setup. Their git features also try to be fancy, but tbh, they’re just confusing. SPM is great, except it supports random git repositories poorly/confusingly, and I didn’t see a way to use a path for a package. I also like how dart packages have an example folder by default, to test using them, and I assume it’s easy to do something similar in swift packages, but yeah.. XCode is unreliable, and there’s a lot of great ideas and language features, and a lot of disappointment when I’ve used other languages and reactive frameworks that have better QOL. Their file formats for all sorts of stuff are confusing, and difficult to manage in git, and their command line tooling is also a pain. Even gradle makes more sense to use and configure. And Apple loves having “good UI”. The problem is, as an engineer, text can be versioned nicely, as well as copy and pasted. Commands can be executed in scripts. But if you want to try and copy a lot of project configuration to a new project for some reason, you’re out of luck in many cases. Like, want to copy SPM packages? In any other package manager, you can just copy your dependencies from your deps file. In Xcode? Your deps are in some gross xcodeproj file, in some gross text format, and have multiple separate blocks in different spots in the file for each package and have randomly generated IDs/etc that have to match between blocks. I understand for most people, UI is good, text/commandline is bad. But for good developers, text is search-able, macro-able, copyable, and so on - if you want a good UI, make it be backed by a good text format. You know what else is great? If you use a comment hotkey, it will comment at the start of the line before any whitespace. OK, I don’t personally like that, but since it’s what the IDE does, I’ll accept it. But then I also try and use the ID’s auto-indent to format some stuff, so I don’t have to manually indent/de-indent my code (in flutter for example, I rely on auto-format on save, to save me from having to manage whitespace so much). But then Xcode will indent your comments, so they now have whitespace before and after the comment. The last thing I didn’t cover, is what often feels like glaring omissions. The UI frameworks often feel incomplete, short sighted, or inflexible. The UI Framework built into flutter in 2018 when it was in beta felt more complete than SwiftUI even recently. Grid, intrinsic sizing options for UIHostingView, TextField currency format, bottom toolbar visibility attributes, all min iOS 16, released 2022. SwiftUI Alert dialogs with icons, List listSectionSpacing min iOS 17, 2023. Flutter had fully customizable material and Cupertino alerts and dialogs in 2018. And stuff just doesn’t work more often in SwiftUI, and even with troubleshooting it feels like there is no good fix. We have one page, where they had a total at the bottom, but the keyboard would close whenever we had fixed content below a scrollview with text fields in it. I spent hours, and figured out the fixed content was the problem, and moved the total to bottom toolbar, but as long as there was padding at the bottom below the scroll, it would still bug, so I also had to remove the padding which looked bad with their UI. So yeah. Xcode works. Swift/SwiftUI are modern frameworks, and havemodern features. But VS/Dart/Flutter, AS/Kotlin/Compose and VS/TS/ReactNative also work, and have modern features. And their quality of life is better, with better stability, better hot reload, they have more built in features, and are more flexible.
