Comment by kitsunesoba
4 years ago
> Dev tools for Windows and iOS/ MacOs are fairly straight forward.
Can't speak much for Windows, but the Apple dev story is pretty good. Platform SDKs are deep and capable, if sometimes not well documented, and there's a clear "right" way to do most things. One can build a "world class" app with nothing but Swift+UIKit and few or no third party libraries. SwiftUI is rapidly improving this too, bringing a fully native "modern" reactive approach that works across all Apple OSes.
Xcode can be a cantankerous beast at times but it's been getting a lot better in recent releases.
> Not sure about Android, since my burning hatred of Java has removed my desire to mess with that platform entirely. (I know Kotlin exists, still not interested)
It's slowly improving but still very much a mess. Jetpack Compose looks to be poising itself as the SwiftUI of Android and that will no doubt improve things, but I have doubts that Android development will ever be as nice as iOS development is.
Well, IntelliJ Idea is a fantastically better IDE than XCode from a functionality standpoint, and Kotlin + Compose is IMHO, better than SwiftUI. Compose isn't a SwiftUI clone, it's a pure-functional memoization framework with compiler support.
> IntelliJ Idea is a fantastically better IDE than XCode from a functionality standpoint
This is not my experience, I've never quite cared for all the finicky setup needed to get things right, and it always feels a bit laggy. (Though IntelliJ is a world better than Eclipse).
It's definitely more laggy, but in terms of everything else, it's light years ahead of Xcode:
1) code navigation, editing, refactoring 2) integration with Git/GitHub, Issue Trackers, Cloud Providers 3) external build system support 4) multiplatform editing (java, js, typescript, kotlin, python, etc) 5) integration with testing, continuous integration, deployment 6) code analysis, finding problems 7) tons of special support for DSLs and third party frameworks
The only thing XCode is better at IMHO is UI building and OSX instrumentation. If you're writing tons of code that doesn't have a UI, especially for cloud backends, I don't think you'd use it.
Even simple things, like language injection, work wonders in the editor window. Having the IDE know how to syntax color, check, and code complete SQL, CSS, HTML, Regex, etc inside strings is a huge help.
I spend 15 years on emacs, and the last 15 on InteliJ, and having an editor that slices and dices code in a myriad a ways with easy to use automation, and actually indexes the code and builds a deeper understanding of the totality of your project is well worth it. I just wish it was less laggy in the UI.
If I was writing an iOS app, sure, I'd use XCode, but I can't envision being it general purpose for anything else, unlike the versatility of other competitors like VSCode.
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