I hate xcode

Simple as that. I hate it. It sucks. The sad part is they really think they have something there. But the only thing they have is a worthless lump of crud. The other day it decided to thrash my system for no apparent reason. Same sources as always, etc. but it took about 10 minutes of thrashing before it stopped. My attempts to watch what was going on in ‘top’ saw memory down to 16MB (I have 2G). After it subsided (and I had tried killing that damn thing and starting over, but it did it again), I was greeted with 1.8 gig of memory again. That’s right, to build my (somewhat small) project, it pretty much ate every living resource on the planet.

Even when at Apple, I never really used it, mostly because it could never build our project. Our project had too many files, and had many different sections with differing compilation options. When we were finally able to get the files into a version of Project Builder/XCode that would hold them, the scrolling list of files was so slow that I just threw the project away. Before you judge how many files were in there, keep in mind that this list was a disclosable one, and even with the groups closed it was still slow. So basically it was calculating something (who knows what) based on the total number of files instead of what was actually showing. Sweet. It might be easy to write things in Cocoa, but it’s also incredibly simple to write a poor performing Cocoa app.

On top of the occasional performance issues that still plague it (for example, failure to keep up with your typing - I mean, a dual G5 should be plenty to process keystrokes), it has its options spread all over the place, which makes it incredibly difficult to manage. Half the things you want to do are in non-obvious places, or buried in some dialog, etc. I have no idea why they put the UI together the way they did. It’s ridiculous. I can never remember where some option is, or how to easily tell what the current options for this or that are.

Visual Studio, on the other, hand, is incredibly well done in comparison. It has its own set of quirks, but all the little features it gives you and the ability to debug quickly and easily make it quite pleasant to develop with. Things are pretty logically layed out. Once you get your head around how it does things, you’re all set. An interesting example is debugging, the fact that you’d use function keys to run the debugger was something laughable to me at first. I mean, come on, function keys? What year am I in? But let me tell you… it’s soooo much easier than any modifier-key-based solution I’ve seen on the Mac. Fact is: it works damn well. VS is also so much more stable than xcode. It does occasionally die (mostly when trying to attach the debugger to a process), but other than that it’s pretty solid.

Going back to use xcode after being in VS-land for so long was a rude awakening, and made it truly clear how far from the mark Apple is with their tools. Maybe it’s all part of their ingenious plan to scare developers away from the platform so they can concentrate on selling more iPods. If so, they’re off to a good start! Next time, I’ll rant about the poor documentation on the Apple site…

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