Xcode 9 is Unacceptable

Agreed, I've never used an IDE this buggy I'm sorry to say.

I'm relatively new to this, but somehow I don't think an IDE should take 15 seconds of the wheel of death to change the font size in my storyboard by one unit, and then change it by 2 or 3 when it finishes. Don't remember this happening in XCode < 9. I suspect Apple bit off more than it could chew with XCode 9, iOS 11, app store, Swift 4 and new hardware releases all at once.

you can count us in as well. Very buggy and very SLOW.

As a matter of fact this is how slow it is... I hit run after fixing an error and the app builds and runs. It runs for a minute or so at which point Xcode figures out that the error has been fixed and it finally removes its Chritsmas Tree like Flashy Red Error Warning.

Brackets, Parenthethes and braces (Auto closing) are being set so sloppily that my blind grandmother had better chances of putting in the finshing brace.

Almost funny to watch how the app literally has no idea where to put the braces (In about 20% of all cases).

And dont get me started on the yellow flashlight constantly highligting my braces. This is VERY VERY VERY annoying when doing pointer arithmetic. But I guess thast those coding Xcode now are all using Swift where pointers are dangerous and called unsafe 😀

Anyway, I welcome the fast scrolling which is not as fast as with sublimeText. But faster than Xcode 8. Stil, I would love for Apple to not keep putting out beta versions and pose them as GMs. Every year the same thing. Juuuust as the app starts to get good they release a new one which isnt, work on that for a year, dump it and post a new non-working.

At some point - even Apple must realize that the pace at which they are going are degrading their Quality. Perhaps iOS 11 will open their eyes.

Latter, I wont even install until earliest Janury.

Anyway, keep posting bugs as much as you can - Apple cant fix what they dont know !

"Apple cant fix what they dont know !" It's weird because there are so many obvious errors that Apple should be aware of by just using their IDE for 10-30 minutes.

For me, what bugs me the most is that autocomplete works either super slow(33% of time), doesn't work at all (33% of time). This also happens with quick documentation. Regarding searching callers of a method and that kind of things (with the little squares icon on the top left) I can get that to work 20% of the time. Also cmd+clicking a symbol to get to its definition works super slow or doesn't work at all.

All of these issues happen randomly when my project compiles and do happen with +90% certainty when there is at least one little error in the code.

I used to work on Android development before and in ~8 years of development I NEVER had that type of issues. Eclipse and IntelliJ aced those BASIC things.

That's the key point - I too think I will wait until January before installing either any new MacOS or definitely any new Xcode.

Xcode 9 has been unbearably bad. Some of the highlights for me:

- Appalling map performance in Simulator

- Autocomplete massive lag making it worse than useless because my muscle-memory types and enters a bunch of stuff expecting it to complete and I end up with lines of rubbish

- Crashes

- Sometimes gets stuck in some kind of automatic building loop, where it builds repeatedly without ever stopping, slowing everything else down even more

I've used Xcode 8.3.3 as much as possible, that was at least reliable.

I agree. Xcode in general, not just 9, is a disgrace.

It is suffice to say that Apple is apparently not bothered by the fact that it releasing, year after year, a 2-star application on the App Store.

Everything related to Apple development is a piece of crap. iTunesConnect is a nightmare. The documentation is written by satan, with total disdain and lack of care.

It is pretty clear to me that Apple hates develpers and is only interested on consumers.

We, developers, should unite and create a group to press apple.

It works perfectly for me. I'm using it to develop applications with C/Objective C for OS X. This and other reviews like this on the App Store appear to be posted by developers that are building apps for iOS, using Swift. I'm SO GLAD I didn't migrate to Swift.

I've been in the software development business for 50+ years. What I observe and experience with the Xcode issues that impact me (and others) -- degredation in software quality - is this: it is the classic example of the engineering tradeoff of quality for schedule. Apple marketing appears to be in the driver's seat and Apple Engineering cannot standup / push back hard enough to allow sufficient time for software inspections and testing of macOSs and iOS!

Watts Humphrey's excellent book, "Winning with Software: An Executive Startegy", points out the fallacy of trading off quality for schedule. Quality saves time and money, period. Years of personal experience in the software development testify to this fact. Moreover, well-published software quality experts like Capers Jones and Stephen H. Kan also attest to this software engineering fact!

In particular, Chapter 4 in Humphrey's book, "Why Quality Pays Off", points out that if the software engineering organization does not manage the quality aspects of software development, no one else in the company will! That is the dilema that Craig Federighi faces today inside Apple.

Unfortunately, with regards to all Apple software development (i.e., macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS), it appears that Apple software engineering management neither understands nor can stand up to the pressures coming from Apple Marketing with regards to the engineering tradeoff between software quality and development schedule.

I opine that the annual schedule for new, major releases of macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS (and the accompanying dog-and-pony shows) are at the heart of poor quality issues in Apple software. Tim Cook and Craig Federighi are the only Apple managers that can fix this problem. Poor software quality over time will eventually catchup with Apple and impact its bottom-line. That's when the quality problem will be addressed!!

As a start, over the next year, I suggest that the next major release of macOS and iOS (Versions 10.14 and 12, respectively) consist of bug fixes only - no new features. I believe this would be a good start in the right direction to stablize these software platforms!

Agree.

Xcode 9 is a real shame, and an absolute pain in the **** to use. CPU >100% (and thus fan noise), failed autocompletes, slow compile times, folding ribbon disappeared, super-slow debugger with Swift, regular crashes... w*f ?

Things get a bit better when coding with ObjC only. Doesn't help to adopt Swift as main programming language 🙂

I've been developing for 15+ years, and on iOS since 4+ years. This is the first Xcode release that makes me regret Android coding.

Sadly, it's just (IMHO) a symptom of the whole Apple software ecosystem degrading in the recent years. Quality is not there anymore.

Even worse, I really have the impression that Apple never listens to developers, and totally ignores their rants about buggy software.

I'm just like you man, I'm sticking to ObjC as much as I can, all my new projects are still pure ObjC.

Swift is not a bad language, but the tools around it (xcode, autocomplete, debugger, syntax highlightning...) are a pure mess, and super annoying to work with.

IMO, people working only with Swift are just driven by the hype (as with every new Apple product - and I consider myself an Apple fan !), and do not even (want to ?) see the regression of the development tools.

I totally agree that XCode is a mess, and that Apple has its in-house development team on a tight budget.

Apple has been reducing their budget for development each year. There is no time to fix bugs, do refactoring or improve components when their development team is very busy with the next big thing. This is for both OSX & iOS. Apple really does NOT care about us (developers) any more.

We should all be looking in migrating our knowledge over to Android!

The day Apple releases a 17 inch Macbook is the day Apple has decided to care about developers again.

This will never happen of course. (Tight budgets you know, they need to make more money!)

Hi everybody,

I'm so happy to see that I'm not alone and at the same time unhappy to see so many of us having so much trouble with the latest version of Xcode.

Since version 9.1, and still in beta version 9.2, every time I press the Enter key, XCode crash!

This is terrible because it happens 25 to 50 times a day and... it's exhausting. 😢

I tested: it happens even on a project that I had not opened for months ...

It seems that the problem is related to the editor of Xcode which writes more things in the memory than it should do ...

Yet, I'm lucky to have a Macbook Pro with 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory ...

After restarting Xcode and trying to modify the file again, then auto-completion does not work anymore and the debugger does not stop on the correct line.

It took me several hours to understand why autocompletion didn't work and what was going on and I discovered, by opening my source file in an other text editor, that my source code was totally corrupted by the crash of Xcode!

Indeed, I saw that Xcode has replaced itself all end line characters by '<CR>' characters. Why not… but only if it works after!

I, of course, reported this bug, but I have no answer (they just asked me to redownload one of my source file).

Curiously, this problem does not exist in version 9.0.1 with exactly the same code!

To imagine why this is so frustrating for me, you just imagine:

You use Microsoft Word every day and, after an automatically update, that suddenly it crashes every time you try to press the Enter key in your document … And, for sure, you don’t know why.

I admit: I like to put spaces between all parentheses, I like to put a new line before and after all my braces, and I like to align my code with tabulations... For my brain, my code must be beautiful. Are these crashes are because of my way of programming?

I love you Apple, but here... this is just not acceptable!

PS:I want to say that I'm not tired and that I have a happy life .... I just want to be able to develop my projects normally again with Xcode.

I agree, I sense a dramatic deteroration in support for Developers, with regard to developer technology quality.

I'd prefer stable tools with reliable features, than rush to market "buggy" bells and whistles.

Today I updated MACOS 10.13.2 Beta (17C67b) The simulator is suddenly very sluggish. The previous version ran smoothly.

I'm running the default SpriteKit template.

Also, I can no long build to my device. I have iOS 11.2 installed on a 5s. It seems I have to purchase a new device.

this is the error I get:

This iPhone 5s (Model A1453, A1533) is running iOS 11.2 (15C5107a), which may not be supported by this version of Xcode.

I appreciate any suggestions.

Agree, Xcode 9 is the worst version to date. It seems like the Xcode team has no idea what is doing. Pretty sure an app like Xcode 9 will fail Apple review policies. For me the UI is frozen most of the time, typing is a struggle, autocomplete is freezing and have to go back and correct it, build times are very high. Getting a lot of crashes and builds failing to run on the sim. Overall Xcode is sluggish - almost unbearable to work with it. Switched back to 8.3 and will use this version as long as possible.

Lately, fueled by some questionable Apple decisions, thinking more and more about stop doing iOS development. Been doing it for 7 years. Just don't think Apple has the leading edge in any domain, anymore. Sooner or later people will get tired of overpriced phones and accessories.

i read lots of complaining and moaning, maybe it's a generational thing? of devs becoming too dependent on some gui to do everything.

i'm still on version 8.3.3 and i'm on the swift email list and decided long ago, i wasn't going to touch swift4.0 or xcode 9 until xcode is at least 9.2 there are tools available to completely build, sign swift projects without ever touching Xcode and I've used them many times.

btw when is the Swift ABI finally going to be released?

IMHO if you know how to hack code, Xcode is irrelevant but then again i cut my teeth with the command line things like sed/grep/awk/vi back when the only gui was a lame version of ddd. when you need to hack code, you hack code, you do whatever is necessary, no excuses. like writing a killer perl one-liner or an awesome sed script.

the bad or lack of documentation doesn't bother me but the abject lack of modernizing the core libs. patching and patching old gcc4.2, where is the built-in support for flac? x265? matroska? and S Jobs would not like that Apple has totally forgotten about things like typesetting like the new-ish svg-open fonts is only supported on the browser.

too much marketing not enough focus on the core fundamentals.

Apple, I'd like a new MBP model of the 17", send me an email, i'll send you specs.

I'm in complete agreement with you. Xcode seems to get a great deal of attention because it's always being updated. For what? I've been using Xcode since 2008 and it's always been "pretty bad but good enough". Now with Swift all of its problems are exacerbated to an unacceptable degree. Swift compilation, code-completion, auto-suggest work abysmallly, and they aren't even the worst problem. These processes are more complex for Swift than Obj-C and it the overhead renders Xcode dumb (SourceKit I guess but Xcode provides our UI into these various dev tools).

Since the advent of Swift (which I love) Xcode is no longer remotely "good enough"; the complete lack of incremental compilation of Swift has driven me almost insane. I've turned Google purple in my search for what build setting (library search paths, or whole module optimisation...) actually makes incremental compilation work. Discussing this my co-ios devs, devs from old companies I work at, and devs who used to work at my current workplace, the only conclusion is that there is no way to make incremental compilation work.

This is not tennable. The other bugs, fine. But this will lead me to quit the platform as a dev. I can't spend hundreds of minutes a day compiling.

The only alternative is AppCode which no ios developer I work with (or have met in real life) actually uses; the difference now is that I now know several who have actually downloaded it and tried it, inlcuding me. There is no actual alternative. We're stuck with a bad IDE that just gets worse.

If people respond to this saying "it works fine for me" then congratulations.

It works very very poorly for a huge number of developers, in particular ones who work on large apps which they have converted to Swift over time to take advantage of the great language features, and have had to watch their project become molasses.

I've taken the time to write this at 19:50 on a Tuesday when I'm still in the office fixing bugs, because it's so frustrating and Apple just doesn't seem think it's a thing at all. If they didn't care about Xcode we wouldn't get all these releases, but the release keep coming and nothing gets better.

Totally agree. We work on an enterprise app and it took serveral days to update our systems, code, pods etc. Now we face with strange errors which even xcode doesn't show the error ! I see this error all around the project :

libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException

So what the hec does this mean ?! I see this problem on scrollView , buttons and so on and the only way for finding the error will be just toggle debugger mode and debug the code line by line to see where will be the problem . And at the end the error doesn't make scense at all

I found the problem ! Its due to @obj keyword for selectors. XCode was failed to refactor all the selectors and for the missing ones It makes this kind of error !

Has Apple responded to any of this?

I've had countless problems by now. Everything from breaking entire projects to annoying things like Xcode insisting on using an intentionally deleted file. Or plain stupid things like Xcode expanding the file tree of non-active projects when building in a workspace. It is an absolute pain to work in Xcode still.

XCode get's worse with every version, OS X get's worse with every version, so does iOS....

Unfortunately there is nobody out there yet to really replace Apple.

Regarding XCode: I am not able to update to 9.1. Looks like many people have the same problem:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152934/os-x-yosemite-xcode-update-stuck-on-waiting?newreg=79aa2ed9f1114e49852879a5bbe0f264

Just one of the countless problems with XCode and ItunesConnect :-/

But as I have updated iOS I have to get to version 9.1.... Apple *****!

Sorry, but "back in my day we didn't have autocompletion" is not an excuse for autocompletion not working.

I just wish Apple would stop implementing new features and get the existing ones right first. The new refactoring tools were long overdue and they are great, but syntax highlighting and autocompletion are fundamentals. I kind of agree it's unacceptable that they don't work half the time.

It's not a Swift thing either, i'm still working on some pure-ObjC projects, and it has the same problems as our Swift projects. I can tolerate Swift still having problems, it's a young language. But Swift support breaking ObjC programming is stupid.

Further to yours and other comments about the quality of XCode 9 I think the time has come to try and make Apple sit up and take notice either by not attending this years WWDC or by standing up and voicing concerns during the event itself. It is absolutely no use whatsoever for Apple to start evangelising about the next version of Xcode when 9 still doesn't work correctly - all we will end up with is more prolonged pain. Most of us will be reluctant to upgrade until at least 6 months has gone by and we are on the 5th Beta anyway...

If Apple want to continue to encourage new developers to join the platform and keep those already here they simply have to focus on getting Xcode working right. When autocomplete doesn't autocomplete and documentation stays out of date or remains generally unhelpful and Interface Builder is full of bugs how on earth are less experienced developers meant to learn anything? When you have to start hunting for an apparent bug that is actually the fault of Xcode itself it can be such a total waste of time and effort. As a lone developer it has been hard enough keeping up with the changes in Swift without having to fight Xcode as well, Apple keeps looking to shiny new features without making last years toys work properly first. Lets have some quality BEFORE quantity, please!

When we see the demos at WWDC I can only think that the Xcode version being used is a secret shiny version used by Apple while we all get the sloppy untested version since most of the features demonstrated do not work or actually break our code leading to compiler errors or obscure run time faults. Just lately Xcode has entered a whole new phase by actually crashing as my app launches and then offering to send Apple a crash report about MY UNDER DEVELOPMENT APP that Apple will not know anything about anyway!

So Apple, PLEASE go back to bi-annual upgrades, get off this absurd yearly cycle, give yourself enough time to test things properly and start giving us the Xcode we all deserve - after all, Apple products are not exactly cheap to purchase, you have made an absolute fortune from the iPhone - surely you must have the resources to fix this?

I know Apple will not read this or give 2 hoots about my little rant but its sort of soothing to get this out there....

Yep, it's all about shiny now days. We need to keep this topic at the top of this list, maybe someone will notice.

Some things that have helped me.

1. More Memory, when I went from 8GB to 40GB operational things like code completion and error detection improved greatly.
2. More Processors, when I went from 2 to 4 cores operational things like code completion and error detection improved greatly.
3. Periodically (usually about 4 times per day) reset all caches:
   1. rm -rfv "$(getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR)org.llvm.clang" (for some reason this silently fails on High Sierra, you have to expand the manually. Probably some arcane Apple security thing.)

   2. rm -rfv "$(getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR)com.apple.dt.Xcode" (for some reason this silently fails on High Sierra, you have to expand the dir manually. Probably some arcane Apple security thing.)

   3. rm -rfv ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.*

4. Clean up the xcode user state for the project. First use "find . -name 'UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate' ". Then delete all files found.
5. Periodically remove everything in the derived data folder.
6. Reboot the computer at least daily.
7. Clean Build Folder in Xcode then quit Xocde every hour.

Xcode expects your code to compile cleanly in order for Code Completion to work at all. Any little error on your part and it just stops with no indication of why. Xcode also expects you to do top down programming. If you jump around between non-completed code segments in a function, xcode just gives up or gets confused. Stub in different functions to get around this and remove them when the code is completed.

When I get a goofy error in Xcode I just reset and reboot everything as described above and magically the error goes away. The most annoying error is the error that gets stuck in xcode. Whether xcode is quit or not it it stays until a reboot. I must be missing some cache someplace.

Totally agree. I have been using Xcode for years and it has steadily declined. Each release is worse than the last. It is unusable slow, it even lags when scrolling, story boards are increasingly slow to load, crashes, code complete failures, find call hierarchy does not update. Too many bugs too list. Every new release there are more posts talking about this same trend and problem, but nothing is done. This is embarassing software and easily the worst IDE I have ever used.

From a UX perspective, it uses non standard pattenrs EVERYWHERE. You have to learn a whole new set of patterns rather than using established UI/UX patterns literally EVERY other application abides by. Some examples:

• You click a file and it opens in the current tab, replacing what you have open
• You use touchpad swiping to navigate back and forth
• CTRL+Tab switches between tabs rather than to previously opened file
• Can't collapse scopes
• Selecting a block of code and hitting tab replaces it with a tab character rather than indenting
• Dragging breakpoints off to remove rather clicking to toggle

These are just off the top of my head.

Fire the product manager for XCode and hire someone competant and give them the resources they need to fix this mess. You are going to lose everyone to react native or 3rd party IDEs, and the quality of your app ecosystem WILL suffer. This reflects terribly on your priorities.

I agree that Xcode has too many bugs, that is sadly true... But I am not sure that it is so bad in the sense that it does not really impact my productivity... the most time I spend is to find the correct design or algorithm to be implemented to do my job.

I work often with beta version though

Anyway, the poor quality sometime is very frustrating. I use a lot playgrounds for some testing and the way it run is not very satisfactory. The completion engine fails too mny time, that is true...

But on the issues you point above, don't forget that you can customize the editor in the corresponding Tab of the preferences, especially Tag can always indent your selected code (I use it all the time), and that you can change key binding

Apple please, add resources to the Tool Dev team... they need it