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Xcode or Visual Studio? No contest!
Battle of the IDEs30 July 2012
by Huw Collingbourne
Windows has Visual Studio which is (in my opinion) by far the best IDE available on any platform. The Mac has Xcode…
I’ve struggled for months to learn to love Xcode but I have finally come to the conclusion that this is never going to happen. At first I wondered if this was just a personal prejudice. However, I am coming to realise that, whereas most Visual Studio users love their IDE, Xcode users tend to be a little less passionate about theirs.
Take, for example, Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby – an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime on OSX. Sansonetti has since developed the RubyMotion for deploying MacRuby programs on iOS. You’d think that, with that Mac-centric background, Sansonetti would be able to muster at least a bit of enthusiasm for the Mac’s ‘default’ IDE. Not so. I’ve just been reading the RubyMotion FAQ and the section on Xcode is not so much a case of ‘damning with faint praise’ as just ‘damning’. Here it is:
Do you support Xcode?
While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to program in RubyMotion, we do not provide any support for Xcode out-of-the-box. We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for Ruby development (or development in general).
Oh well, at least it’s not just me. Now back to Visual Studio. Joy!
