Xcode 4.2 was atrociously buggy and I frequently had crashes on an hourly basis. 4.3 seems a bit more stable - but lldb still has quite a few issues (understandable). As a developer, I'd sort of expect a bit more support and _reliability_ from the development tools.
It isn't completely a cost center as they do make money from developer subscriptions.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to experience these constant crashes. It got to the point where my colleagues were convinced it was something wrong with my code/project that was causing it to crash constantly (I'm the only one using Xcode here).
It's a great tool and I am glad for the constant improvements Apple seem to be making, but it is a source of regular frustration for me at the moment.
Same here, I just finished a 3 month gig building a prototype for a startup on an iPad and I was surprised how often the latest Xcode crashed and how unstable it was. However, in its defense, I never lost work due to it and it always restarted with my window config intact.
Have you been upgrading your Xcode installs or installing from scratch? I have a theory that Apple really doesn't test the upgrade path much and a lot of the problems I've seen seem to stem from that.
If true reinstalling everytime is definitely not an acceptable solution but at least it is a solution.
It isn't completely a cost center as they do make money from developer subscriptions.
More than the developer subscriptions, they make money by having an attractive platform by making sure developers are happy to develop for their platform. "Here's a free shiny shovel that works great!"
I think the subscriptions are mostly a small barrier to entry so that not everybody and their grandmother get their own license. For example, if licenses were free, it'd be much easier to share and install open-source software, bypassing completely the App Store. As it is, you'd need to save $99 in apps before it's useful.
> I think the subscriptions are mostly a small barrier to entry so that not everybody and their grandmother get their own license. For example, if licenses were free, it'd be much easier to share and install open-source software, bypassing completely the App Store.
The XCode download is free. You only need a Mac developer subscription to distribute your apps through the App Store.
Flagging as trolling...and then taking the troll-bait.
All software ships with bugs--including the software this guy will create using XCode. Despite that, this type of drivel is still common among software developers. "One (relatively minor) bug exists that happens to annoy me: that must mean their whole QA process is shit!"
Come off it; this type of rant would be warranted if XCode routinely crashed when you paste a paragraph of text into a label--not because it behaves in a funky way.
But some software ships with a lot more bugs than other software does.
Xcode has all manner of funky little bugs like this; maybe not in and of themselves worth a blogrant, but Xcode also does routinely crash (every single goddam day in my experience, and that of many people I work with); it does claim unit tests passed without running them; it does corrupt the internal structure of complex projects such that you have to manually start over adding source code and resource file references; it does have many more bugs that require a significant amount of time to track down and work around -- far more than any other software package I use.
So I definitely would not begrudge any Xcode user a cathartic rant (although perhaps it's not something that belongs on the front page of HN).
I think what happens is that developers see this instability all the time, and it slowly drives them to the edge, then one day a particular bug, not very important on its own, causes them to go over. If they aren't careful to realize that it's the huge history of bugs driving the rant, then it will come off looking like much ado about little.
I completely agree that this particular complaint is blown way out of proportion. But I think that's probably where it's ultimately coming from.
I agree (from personal experience and obvservation). The cumulative effect of all the little indignities a developer suffers at the hands of Xcode build up like steam in a pressure cooker, until it has to go somewhere. (A rant on a blog, a mouse hurled against a wall, chairs kicked over, whatever...)
I read it as the last straw. Instead of the impression of fewer and fewer bugs in new releases, he started running into them often enough, until the first action he tried in the new release was buggy. That's really not a good state.
I'm not sure what would be a useful criticism for a "I keep running into bugs in your software and it's pissing me off enough to share this with random developers on the internet" situation. Especially when a bug is a regression and the proper behaviour can be found in the previous version. Apparently submitting the bug is something that the poster is familiar with and which doesn't work that well either. Can you come up with some useful criticism for such situation?
Unhelpful trolling. Xcode is buggy. As dev-facing software that's undergoing a cycle of rapid change, it's not as clean as everyone would like it to be. I'm not convinced it could be much cleaner at the rate they're changing things.
And IB has always handled labels with long blocks of text badly. That's because they're not supposed to hold long blocks of text, they're supposed to hold labels.
In over 13 years of coding I've never used a tool as buggy and crash-prone as XCode 4. I swear at it on a daily basis. I think they're mostly going in the right direction with the feature set but the fact that it's still this unstable after three point releases undermines my confidence in the underlying code base.
Have you been upgrading your Xcode installations or starting from scratch?
I got my Mac in 2010 and was having major Xcode problems with 4.x but I had to nuke my computer when 10.7.2 came out and I've had almost no problems since then with a fresh Xcode 4.2 install.
Not trying to apologize for Apple, Xcode does seem to have some serious problems, but figured I'd throw out how I "solved" my problems.
That's unfortunate. I'd be interested in knowing how many people at Apple actually use Xcode daily (and how many of those are the developers who actually work on Xcode).
Apple has grown a lot in recent years and I'm sure a lot of the new blood grew up on Xcode 3 but I've heard from friends that a lot of the old guard at Apple continue to use things like emacs/vim.
I'm not being rigorous here, but it seems to me that the top comment on every HN article that points out anything wrong with an Apple product is by an Apple apologist? It's a bit...fawning.
You certainly can't get far without someone playing the "apologist" or "fanboy" card. This is annoying because you are presenting no argument or evidence, you're just saying "this person's opinion is bullshit because of the apparent side they have chosen". I don't see what value that adds, it just dumbs down the entire conversation.
Xcode is indeed developed with Xcode, a fact which has astonished me for years. I can't comprehend how they've let some of these things happen given that they have to use the thing every day.
Why are so many poorly written articles making it to the front page? It seems to me the author didn't do any QA on their article either. It's hard to take someone's argument seriously when they don't take the time to proofread their own work.
I'd be happy if people just stopped claiming they made a pun, simply because a word has two slightly different meanings in the dictionary and they used it both ways.
Thanks to your comment I decided to take a serious look at this. I'm a big fan of IntelliJ so I know how good their other IDEs are.
After working with an existing project for about half and hour I think I'm convinced enough to risk $99 on it. My main worry was that it wouldn't smoothly hand off xibs/storyboards to interface builder but that seems to work ok. Already this feels like a tool that was designed for programmers and not to fit somebody's idea of a shiny interface.
Totally Agree. I'm using it as my main IDE now. Sometime I still have to switch back to Xcode to do thing like with Core Data and Interface Builder, but most of the time I'm staying in AppCode.
I don't really understand the sentiment of the author. Xcode is free, and even when it wasn't free it was very very cheap. A decade or two ago it was very common to charge hundreds of dollars for much much shittier IDEs, the Professional edition of Visual Studio is still at least $500 and Apple is giving away Xcode for free. There are alternatives if you don't like it, JetBrains has an excellent IDE for Objective-C development but you can also use VIM or Emacs.
Really, I am puzzled by this level of sense of self-entitlement.
A decent development environment equates to self-entitlement?
If there is any sense of entitlement, it's that Apple is the company that tells everyone how they do everything as perfect as possible. Xcode is a gigantic exception to that rule; it's really quite lame, and the OP is simply pointing out an example.
On a comparative note, citing software sales practices from 20 years ago doesn't make Xcode not worthy of criticism today.
XCode is free in part because it is expected that Apple will make money off of it indirectly. Even if you don't pay for XCode itself, Apple can make money:
- because you build a Mac app that attracts people to the Mac
- because you build an iOS app that attracts people to iOS
- because you build a paid Mac or iOS app that you sell through the app store, and they take a cut
Beyond that, if you want to package an app for the app store, as far as I understand, you have to use XCode. So Apple is saying, if you want to make money building for our platform, then generally we'll get money too, and you have to use our IDE for at least part of the process. At that point, it's understandable to expect some quality out of the IDE, I think.
This is a fair point; it makes business sense from Apple's point of view to give it away for free, however the same reasoning didn't stop Microsoft and IBM in the 80's/90's to charge developers $3000 for the OS/2 SDK.
In response to your second point, I would like to point out that submitting to the App Store is the only part of the process that has to be done in Xcode, which is a very tiny part of the app development cycle.
I have been using the developer preview for Xcode 4.4 (running on Mountain Lion) to work through some OS X and iOS 5 programming tutorials. I am doing this for fun, not as part of my consulting business, but that said, I am not running into any show stopping problems.
Did you really not have the time to open the App Store and type "Xcode"? Really? Hell even if you're not on a Mac type "Xcode" into Google and look at the first result!
I think I came out wrong. I know its freely available. However, most people who use it to get anything useful done (iOS apps, mac-appstore apps) end up paying Apple, subscription fees.
It isn't completely a cost center as they do make money from developer subscriptions.