Xcode 4 Rant
It’s been a while!,I’ve been working a lot lately to reach Gando Games Engine alpha state. It has been quite interesting, learning a lot, and even contributing to some Open Source projects.My motivation for this post however, is that Xcode 4 GM was released officially. I’ve been working with Xcode 4 for a while, and have filed some bug reports on Apple’s Radar. While I really like the whole Xcode 4 concept and features, and I think that they take the whole Xcode experience to a new level, I’m not happy to see Apple, my all-time favorite company to release Xcode in it’s current state. I mean, it happened with Project Builder, but this is 2011, I can’t believe they did the same thing.
I’m angry/sad:
- One week ago my Xcode project didn’t compile on Xcode 4 GM seed 2 … but thanks to a guy in the Apple Developer Forums who found a hack, it does now ( with GCC, forget LLVM 2.0 ). But the shipped version of Xcode 4 is the same version that I was using a week ago ( GM seed 2 4A304a ). I wasn’t the only one experiencing this issue.
- I filed a critical issue on Apple radar (8965623) about a month ago. Several people working with large C++ codebases (some where using boost, some where using luabind) where experiencing awful performance issues. While Xcode indexes my project using luabind my average RAM usage climbs to about 2.5 GB and my CPU ussage to 400%. I wasn’t alone at this and was contacted twice by Apple Engineering, I even supplied a test project to trigger the issue, result: bug not fixed. ( My Fix: buy 8 GB of RAM for my MacBook Pro i5. )
- I’m now experiencing problems with syntax highlighting and I keep experiencing awful resource usage issues.
Some rant about it:
Ok, I know it’s impossible to ship “bug free” software ( yeah, I’m actually aware of that 
). But what about all the devs who are paying for a developer program ( 100 USD a year or more if you are also involved in OS X dev program ), and actually invested time reporting bugs and issues on Apple Radar and didn’t get their critical issues fixed ( even if some of them filed issues a while ago ). This “testers” where worried about an app that needed to be polished a bit more, and actually their reports where not only on their own direct benefit, but on the benefit of all Apple devs.
We all know how important developers are for Apple, without them, Apple biggest products would be a lot less than what they are ( IMHO ). I’m sure that Xcode 4 will reach a more polished state sooner than later (at least I hope so), but in my opinion it doesn’t look good from a developer perspective to see your everyday work tool tagged as GM at it’s current state.
Perhaps I’m being naive, maybe it’s a matter of my own “Developer Ethics”… or maybe not.
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Seth March 31st
I’ve experienced so many bugs in Xcode 4 in the first 2 hrs – let alone the numerous UI bugs – small interactions that leave a lot to be desired.
Its the buggiest Apple software I’ve encountered in a long time, which is particularly embarrassing (if, ironically, more understandable) for a Dev Tool.
Chris July 2nd
Nicolas, I was googling around and found your post here. It describes exactly what I’m seeing too. I’m using booth boost and luabind, with those same xcode symtoms. I was curious if you had heard back from Apple about a fix yet? Thanks,
Nicolas Goles July 5th
@Chris: It was marked as a duplicate a long time ago, but it’s still happening… ( I went to 8 GB of RAM and now I can use the software ). It would be great if you could report the issues in https://bugreport.apple.com/ , I still think it’s the best way to go. And of course make noise about it
Cheers!
Paul July 20th
If a developer released an app that was as buggy as Xcode 4, it wouldn’t make it to the app store. Forget the programming quirks… I can’t even rely on it not to crash and exit while I’m typing code, or while I’m just sitting there minding my own business. I hate working with it – the whole thing is very demoralizing.
David August 4th
I don’t consider myself to be a developer in the class that you guys are but I must say XCode sucks more than any app I’ve used in years. That includes many an open source Beta product.
First off one really shouldn’t need a mainframe to run XCode. However it has brought my 2008 MBP to a halt far to many times. This makes me wonder a bit about Mac OS because you would think that it would balance processor time a bit better so that the GUI would work. In any event taking 100% of a machines resources is never acceptable.
Now like many here I can understand bugs, however when they come by the bushel it isn’t really acceptable. Just yesterday for example I wanted to build a library which of course required setting up build settings. This lead to a most frustrating experience where I would try to enter in some defines and other flags and oops nothing would happen. Come to find out XCode would put the data somewhere else ( where it made no sense). Eventually I had to restart XCode with just about every edit. Even then the corrections or changes I made or thought I made would not be retained all the time. Such failures cause an immense waste of time and an extremely negative opinion of Apple. In a word XCode is crap. One shouldn’t end up beaten and bruised just trying to set up some preprocessor and C++ flags.
Mind you if this was the only issue id try to accept it. However there is almost nothing about XCode that doesn’t have issues. Things that should be obvious aren’t which would be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that this is Apple.
JSmith August 11th
I am experiencing all the same issues. I have what I would call a moderately sized C++ project.
Xcode is an IDE. Just not a RAD tool.
Rashid September 11th
Xcode 4 is the worst development environment i have come across in 35 years of software development. How could Apple release such a ” crappy” program. There are Fundamental issues with XCODE 4. Can not view global variables when using GDB, and oh my god LLDB displays incorrect data.. resource hogger etc…
I am now investigating returning to XCODE 3.2 to finish my project; and BTW i will also have revert back to snow leopard, as apple does not want a tried and tested program to be used on Lion.
P.S .. and I am an Apple fan
DccNetwork April 21st
Noted that this thread is old and hoped that the latest release of xCode would be better…. but its not at least by much. I’ve been around in some form or another since Code Warrior and xCode 4 is just terrible maybe even the worst I’ve had to endure. Even on a simple project its such a mess that you can’t believe you are using an apple product. So frustrated I had to add my 2 cents.
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