I’ve been using Xcode for a good long time (since before it was called Xcode).
It has many detractors, and though I understand why people get frustrated with it, on balance I’m not one of them these days. I say on balance because there are undoubtedly things about it that drive me mad. That’s has been equally true in the past though of Visual Studio, Eclipse, Metrowerks, Think C, etc.
I think a lot of the criticism of Xcode is unjust.
A lot of it comes from switchers who are actually saying “I don’t understand this because it doesn’t look like insert-my-favourite-IDE-here”. Well, no shit! Different it is, but different is not necessarily worse.
A lot of it also comes from the kind of programmers who don’t really understand build systems, don’t like the fact that making large software projects is complicated, and would really like it if someone else just made it all work. These guys are probably happy with a simple project (maybe taken from a sample and hacked about a bit), but as soon as they have to make a change to a build setting, or work with a multi-target, multi-project setup, and something goes wrong, they get snarky and blame the IDE for being crap. These guys would probably not be much happier with anything else, but for whatever reason they’re using Xcode, so they bitch about Xcode.
So, anyway, hopefully we’ve established that I quite like Xcode. Xcode 4, in particular, is a bit improvement in lots of ways over Xcode 3.
Except. Except.. ah..
WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO XCODE 4.3?
On the face of it, not a lot has changed. Except for one really big thing, which is that almost every file that it uses has moved to a new location on the disc, inside the application bundle. But that shouldn’t affect us right? All we generally do is launch the application, and a few other tools, and some command line utilities, and - well, it shouldn’t affect us too badly, surely?
Well, you’d hope not, but you can see how it might flush out certain incorrect assumptions about where things are relative to each other.
Whether that’s the reason, or it’s something else, this version appears to be really, really crashtastic! It crashes when I do stuff. It crashes when I don’t do stuff (seriously, it crashes when I just leave my computer sometimes). It throws up random modal alerts with obscure error messages. It gets confused and refuses to build projects that it happily builds if you approach them from a different direction. Worst of all, it ignores previous settings about where I want my curly brackets god dammit!
It may be that I’m alone in this, and there’s something strange about my setup. I do admittedly have four different generations of Xcode installed on my machine to cope with the different requirements of various clients.
I doubt that’s it though. The word I’m hearing from all the other developers that I know suggests that my experience is pretty typical.
To me this raises some concerns about Apple’s internal Q&A for their tools department. How exactly did this thing end up going out in this state? The first beta of it was actually quite solid, but the last one and the actually release have been woefully unstable.
What concerns me more though is that Xcode is one great big monolithic lump of closed-source code. It may be modular under the hood (there’s clearly some sort of plug-in architecture), but it’s clearly not modular in a very rugged sense, since Apple only ever seem to want to distribute releases of the whole damn thing in one big lump. If that policy is based on the danger of instability if pieces are updated individually, that’s bad in what it hints about the true state of the code. It’s also bad because, frankly, that policy ain’t working.
To be fair, the decision to keep the releases monolithic may be based more on the complexity of supporting lots of versions of Xcode. If all the components were changing all the time that could get messy I grant you, but if that’s the case then the really really need to make sure that official releases are stable.
Because new releases don’t come along that often.
Betas aren’t that rare (indeed, I have one right now, which is even crashier than 4.3), but betas don’t always help. For every thing that is fixed, a couple of others are either broken or in a state of temporary flux.
I don’t have any simple solutions, but I really hope that this is a blip, since currently, working with Xcode is a profoundly unpleasant experience for me.
Actually, I do have a couple of solutions, but I doubt that Apple will go for them.
One is to open source the bastard. How I would love to be able to just dive in and fix the bugs that are biting me. If there’s one thing that really ought to make sense to open source, it’s a development environment, given the skill set of the user base!
Assuming that’s not going to happen, the next thing I’d really like to see is for Apple to split up the release cycles a little bit.
Fair enough maybe we can’t have a crazy free for all where I can download the latest beta of IDEGit.ideplugin and install it individually, but why on earth do I have to wait for iOS 5.1 to be released before someone will fix some bugs in Xcode’s text editor? It’s ridiculous. No reason at all, except for the monolithic release model.
It would be great if at least the release cycle of the editing environment, the compiler tool chain, the sdks and the ancillary tools were independent, so that the IDE could be updated far more frequently.
There are signs that they’re attempting to go that way, but I’d really like to see them pursue it more aggressively. In the meantime, I live in hope of a new, more stable, beta.