Comment by briandw
11 hours ago
True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.
> If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.
Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.
Seen it once - it got done because there was enough will to make it happen but it probably took a decade.
Whether it was successful or not is up for debate. It certainly was nowhere near as performant as the old system but probably 99% of features came across.
You are of course correct. It's not likely to succeed. "Could work" doesn't mean high chance of success. I was trying to imply the opposite. It's just that Xcode has so much baggage that the previous attempts have been very compromised.
In this particular case they just need to release a tool that properly generates compile_commands.json and .clangd from a .xcodeproj.
Boom! emacs is the IDE now. Bonuses all around.
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Why would being "swift first" affect anything? Why do you assume Xcode isn't already full of Swift code?