<story><title>Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X</title><url>http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2015-11-10-osx-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stinos</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Xcode isn’t too bad.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I&amp;#x27;ve always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn&amp;#x27;t deal with it even though I tried. I don&amp;#x27;t remember all details but in general it just felt inferior to VS on like all fronts, with no advantages of any kind (for C++). Again, IIRC, but it did annoying things like opening the same document in multiple windows, one for editing and one for debugging or so? Anyway, what&amp;#x27;s the state today?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lordnacho</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m using both every day at the moment.&lt;p&gt;- I don&amp;#x27;t spend a lot of time setting up the IDE, so it&amp;#x27;s important the defaults are sensible. For instance, it might be possible to change this, but XCode&amp;#x27;s code completion seems to be less useful than VC2015. I really need it to be near immediate, and I also need it to check string that may appear in the middle of a function name instead of just the start. Especially since NS libraries have strange and long names for things. As I&amp;#x27;m writing this, I just found out you can have tabs in XCode. Why isn&amp;#x27;t that a default?&lt;p&gt;- XCode crashes maybe once or twice a week for me. VC doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;- Unspecific weird things happen in XCode way more than VC. For instance I was unable to see variable values in XCode for a while. Eats up my time looking it up. Hasn&amp;#x27;t happened to me on VC yet.&lt;p&gt;- XCode is highly integrated with the Apple environment. You can build stuff for the app store and send it right there.&lt;p&gt;- XCode has a less than complete Git integration. You need a bit more detail than what it gives you. I use SourceTree anyway, but it might matter for some people.&lt;p&gt;- Compile times are hard to compare, as I&amp;#x27;m doing different things on the two environments. VC2015 is definitely a lot faster than a few years ago though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X</title><url>http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2015-11-10-osx-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stinos</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Xcode isn’t too bad.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I&amp;#x27;ve always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn&amp;#x27;t deal with it even though I tried. I don&amp;#x27;t remember all details but in general it just felt inferior to VS on like all fronts, with no advantages of any kind (for C++). Again, IIRC, but it did annoying things like opening the same document in multiple windows, one for editing and one for debugging or so? Anyway, what&amp;#x27;s the state today?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flohofwoe</author><text>I use both VS and Xcode daily. Once you get over the initial &amp;quot;gee this thing looks like iTunes&amp;quot; shock and get used to a few small annoyances, Xcode is quite ok to work with. Keyboard shortcuts and source file navigation are completely different to anything else though, once you get used to it, it works well though.&lt;p&gt;Where Xcode is better than Visual Studio for C&amp;#x2F;C++ dev (IMHO of course):&lt;p&gt;- C++ compiling and linking is easily 5x..10x faster out of the box than Visual Studio thanks to clang&lt;p&gt;- the static analyzer has a really nice &amp;#x27;arrow&amp;#x27;-visualization of the steps that lead to the warning&lt;p&gt;- clang provides more useful error messages&lt;p&gt;- compiler warnings and errors are directly overlaid into the text editor view&lt;p&gt;- built-in support for clang address sanitizer (just a checkbox to tick)&lt;p&gt;- support for iOS development is really slick&lt;p&gt;- better out-of-the-box support for command line builds either through xcodebuild or the gcc-compatible toolchain&lt;p&gt;- Xcode comes with a lot of profiling and analysis tools where Visual Studio has only slowly caught up (but VS2015 seems to be mostly on par).&lt;p&gt;Where Xcode falls behind compared to VS:&lt;p&gt;- Xcode has that strange &amp;#x27;Scheme&amp;#x27; feature for build configuration&lt;p&gt;- the debugger&amp;#x27;s variable inspection has usability issues&lt;p&gt;- working on source files with a couple thousand lines of code feels laggy&lt;p&gt;- before El Capitan, the whole UI felt slow on a Retina MBP, but I guess that&amp;#x27;s because of general optimizations in the OS&lt;p&gt;- it crashes or freezes about once or twice a week on me&lt;p&gt;- probably a number of smaller ignorances which I have learned to ignore&lt;p&gt;I usually don&amp;#x27;t touch any of the UI builder tools in both IDEs, only straight C and C++ stuff so I can&amp;#x27;t comment on the more platform-specific features.&lt;p&gt;[edit: formatting]</text></comment>