Comment by allthetime 8 hours ago
Honest question.
I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch.
Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day.
What is so horrible about XCode?
> I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points.
This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app.
It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern but artificial limitations and breaking changes that meant the app needed frequent housekeeping even when its features remained unchanged.
For a company that gets a huge part of its revenue on its oversized App Store tax, developers, and their tooling, should be one of their highest priorities IMO. Instead, we get Kafkaesque situations like "my app doesn't compile today... oh, I need to open my Apple Developer account in the browser and accept a new little change in their kilometric EULA that I always pretend I've read carefully". Things like this could be handled better.
Edit: I also had to learn Android Studio for another app, and the experience had less friction overall, but that could mean that I've also learned to work around the shortcomings of JetBrains IDEs. Google is undeniably more developer-friendly than Apple IMO, though.
Honestly, that just sounds like it does things in an unfamiliar (to you) way. That's the flip side of the coin "This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings".
There is no perfect IDE. They all have problems / are inadequate / get in the way. I absolutely loathe IntelliJ IDEA for example, and think Eclipse is needlessly complex (though I'd like their code-indentation/formatting UI to replace the one in Xcode).
Honestly, Xcode gets a lot of bad comments, but it works pretty well for me and the debugging tools are pretty much top-notch if you take the time to learn them.
I started a project on January 5th. Running sloc right now I see:
---------- Result ------------
Physical : 44454
Source : 31019
Comment : 7284
Single-line comment : 2622
Block comment : 4662
Mixed : 210
Empty block comment : 2
Empty : 6363
To Do : 0
----------------------------
That's a lot of code in just under a month (and none of it from AI tools), I don't think the IDE is getting in my way.
First time I tried it, I realised there is no way to have a terminal emulator panel. A bloody terminal. Like the most basic feature you could integrate into an IDE. No thank you.
I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ?
Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used to or something. I've got 3 4k screens connected to a Mac Studio here, and plenty of space for a terminal or four to be running on-screen at the same time and in windows that don't obscure the things I want to look at. I guess if you code on an MBP and space is limited, it might be easier to switch to ? But I generally want that space for my debugger and console-app i/o. I think it'd just get in the way...
Oh you're why they add that. I just use a dedicated app. What's the benefit of putting it in the same window as the editor?
Replied on a sibling too, but:
> Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example. > Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.
Window switching is bad enough on MacOS, especially if you have multiple projects open at the same time.
...were built-in Terminal emulators even particularly common before VS Code? I remember that being a major feature of VS Code early on.
Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating.
First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.
The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?
The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?
Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…
I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.
Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.
> functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense
My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway.
Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start).
The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program.
When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout).
Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb.
For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly, debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work).
The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.
Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy.
XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio.
As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happens instantly running under VS on Windows).
The Jump to Definition seems to have gotten flakier. Or maybe it's always been terrible relative to Visual Studio, IDK. But regardless a lot of times I'm just going by memory and Cmd+F on XCode - Jump to Definition and Cmd+Shift+o are just not getting there.
The Variables pane in the Debugger often just fails to actually ... display anything for any of the variables when stopped at a breakpoint. Sometimes it will appear after stepping a couple lines, sometimes it won't.
The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.
I am an emacs guy so it's not like I'm disposed to like Visual Studio. Visual Studio's quality has slipped a little too. But XCode feels straight-up amateurish in comparison to it. That said, at least Apple is actually exposing the capabilities of the IDE to their LLM integration offering. This is an improvement over the abortion that is Copilot integration in Visual Studio.
> The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.
You can’t step into a lambda stored in a std::function
Absolute nightmare if you don’t know which lambda it might be so you can set a breakpoint in it.
Honestly, compared to Visual Studio, Xcode is 20 years behind.
Historically one of the big problems with Xcode has been that they only dogfood. There’s people on the team that have not touched any other IDE in decades. They’ve gotten used to all of the quirks, and just don’t really know that things could be better. Every new improvement has to be designed from scratch rather than just ripping off what other IDEs do better.
Apple internally has structured their projects to not run into all of the debugger performance cliffs, but don’t provide any guidance on how to do the same thing and don’t proactively fix the problems they’ve avoided.
Every time I’ve talked to someone who has worked on Xcode they’ve expressed the opinion that Xcode is best-in-class and they simply don’t understand why people disagree.
> Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI?
This is so you can see function names for system frameworks. You can step into them if you want too even if Xcode tries to stop you doing it by default.
Mostly the fact that for the past 10 years they've been adding new features but never finished them and taken the time to properly bugfix them along the way. Just a few I ran into recently:
- Interface Builder is stuck in early 2010s. Not only is the property panel missing half of options we now take for granted everywhere else (like corner radius), it also randomly won't read fonts in the current project, will crash the entire IDE if you Cmd-Z a big change (things like unembedding a view) and half the UI is still not rendered the way it will be on the phone. Yes, Swift UI exists, but most bigger apps are still XIBs and Storyboards and it's going to remain that way for quite some time.
- Autocomplete is a hit or miss. Very much like the mid-90s Microsoft IDEs where you'd get totally useless results until you've typed the whole line out already. It can be done well, look at AppCode.
- Syntax highlighting feels pretty much the same. Randomly flashes on and off, often doesn't highlight until return is pressed, takes a long time to load on large files etc.
- Git integration is by far the worst I've seen out of any IDE and I've seen many. I'd go as far as to say that SourceSafe integration in VB6 was done better. Just the whole layout, modal-on-modal returning to the first modal on an error in the second and so on. It's crashed when rebasing a few times too, I don't trust it with larger operations since.
- Documentation browser is this annoying little window with semi-useful search. But don't worry, the docs in there are useless anyways. I could go on and on about their approach to docs but maybe next time.
Don't even get me started on performance. Things like switching file tabs should be instant by now but there are still noticeable delays for larger files and IB screens. Plus there's now two kinds of tabs (app-level and file-level) to add to the mess.
While I don't quite have the same problems as others have, there are some pain points.
Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working.
Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone.
Xcode likes to sometimes recompile files that haven't changed slowing everything down, sometimes significantly depending on the file. No idea why.
It can get very confused if you're missing a parenthesis in the wrong place in a SwiftUI View leading to opaque swift compiler errors about code being too complex.
Even mildly complex use of a swift #Predicate will cause an error about it being too complex forcing you to break them down into smaller pieces and even then it takes far too long to build even on a brand new machine.
The simulators are quite slow to start/update/run and xcode sometimes fails to shut them down completely when quitting leading to them just continually running eating memory unless you kill the processes manually.
The simulators also are really limited in their functionality. No background processes, spotlight, network degradation simulation, out of memory killer, etc.
The profiler sometimes just fails to start an app correctly, immediately ending a run forcing you to close the profiler and reopen it again before it'll start working.
Symbol refactor (rename) can be painfully slow where the UI just locks up until it can find all the references.
Xcode likes to duplicate package dependencies in xcodeproj. It just creates new hashes for the same library and adds it as a dependency over and over again, so when the link phase happens, it adds libraries repeatedly over and over and over again unless you manually clear them out. Not sure what causes this, perhaps updating the version or merges between users.
its almost tautological that a person who has been using xcode for 10 years would be incapable of seeing any flaws in it
It’s so great when the files on the navigator pane aren’t sorted, and then if you right-click sort, it rewrites half your pbxproj file and you get merge conflicts everywhere. So then nobody sorts the files because they don’t want to deal with it. Why can’t the sorting be a view thing that’s independent of the contents of the project file? Who knows.
When I used it in a team, I had to write a build step that would fail the build if the pbxproj file wasn’t sorted. (Plus a custom target that would sort it for you.) It was the only way to make sure it never got unsorted in the first place.
as of Xcode 16, the default uses actual directories for folders instead of file references in the pbxproj file, which eliminates those annoying merge conflicts. at my work it took a bit of effort to move the project over to using folders but it was 100% worth it.
Xcode is abysmal on a large codebase. Freezes constantly on operations. The most useful features stall the entire program, things like: test navigator, quick open files, debugger, etc..
But I agree that Xcode runs fine on small projects and recent version feel stable compare to past releases.
There is barely anything wrong with Xcode. I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code. Haters gonna hate. I also write apps for every Apple platform and really no complaints except I wouldn't mind a better Vim mode (it does however suffice!)
Inflexible window layout. (For example, suppose you want to see breakpoints list, call stack, and find results simultaneously. You can't, as they all share the same panel. Which is always on the left of the window.)