zlacker

Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy.

XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio.

As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happens instantly running under VS on Windows).

The Jump to Definition seems to have gotten flakier. Or maybe it's always been terrible relative to Visual Studio, IDK. But regardless a lot of times I'm just going by memory and Cmd+F on XCode - Jump to Definition and Cmd+Shift+o are just not getting there.

The Variables pane in the Debugger often just fails to actually ... display anything for any of the variables when stopped at a breakpoint. Sometimes it will appear after stepping a couple lines, sometimes it won't.

The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.

I am an emacs guy so it's not like I'm disposed to like Visual Studio. Visual Studio's quality has slipped a little too. But XCode feels straight-up amateurish in comparison to it. That said, at least Apple is actually exposing the capabilities of the IDE to their LLM integration offering. This is an improvement over the abortion that is Copilot integration in Visual Studio.

>>neutro+(OP)
> The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.

You can’t step into a lambda stored in a std::function

Absolute nightmare if you don’t know which lambda it might be so you can set a breakpoint in it.

Honestly, compared to Visual Studio, Xcode is 20 years behind.

>>jahnu+el
You're holding it wrong. You're not supposed to code for Apple products using C++. You're supposed to use Swift

(only half joking)

>>neutro+(OP)
What Copilot can use the IDE when actively debugging.

>>neutro+(OP)
Have you tried Clion for C++? I am not an experienced C dev by any means, but I am satisfied with their debugging for all the projects I worked on in that IDE. It has a free community license so no need to pay

>>neutro+(OP)
Xcode is really only usable for Objective-C, C and Swift its support for C++ e.g. simple things like formatting and definitions and debugging for C++ are as you note are just poor

Visual Studio does treat C++ as a first class language (I suspect because that was the first non C language it supported and Windows apps used C++ in the 1990s)

I would try Clion for C++ if you can't use VS. Eclipse was reasonable 15 years ago when Apple used gcc.

>>asimov+uI1
I have not!

Ultimately, my complaints only really apply to coding for work. For personal projects I find emacs / LSP / dap more than sufficient.

But to be honest this is still something I should maybe bring up with our tools team. If it works well with .xcodeproj files it might be a good fit for our team.