On 09/09/2005, at 07:52 , Markus Hitter wrote:
I can understand most of these ex-CodeWarriors. Most of them probably worked with this IDE for years and for a living and and their coding habits should fit CodeWarrior's feature set quite well. Now, because Apple goes i386, they see themselves all of a sudden forced to play with a different friend, in a new neighborhood, all day at work.
I don't think that's really the point. Ten years ago, I used MWCW extensively. It had its flaws, but overall it was nice. I never upgraded to the OSX versions because Xcode was free and I've been living under the hope that it will get better. And to be fair, it is, slowly.
Xcode has some really neat ideas, and it *should* be a great IDE to work in. Unfortunately, for me and many others, it doesn't work out so well in practice. Compared to MWCW ten years ago, or compared to MSVC today, Xcode isn't very easy for me to work with. And I've been using it since it was released, so it's not a "you're not used to it" issue. It's slow - incredibly slow if you work on large projects with less than about 1.5GB ram, and sluggish but usable on small projects - and it's fairly buggy. Not a day goes past at work where I don't have an "okay, so why did that break?" moment (at home in a more controlled environment this happens less.)
Don't get me wrong, I think the IDE has great potential and it's improving fast. It's a real pity that apple doesn't have more control over the underlying toolchain, because I suspect that a lot of the flaws are weaknesses inherent in gcc/gdb on darwin/ppc.
I just find it sad that I have less productivity on a top-of-the-line G5 today than I do on a moderate spec PC, or did ten years ago under MacOS 9. I'm not bashing Xcode by saying that, just relating my personal experience with the product.
my 20c :)
chris |