XCode hate and loathing
Is the debugger now completely messed up in 1.2 ? I compile and link with -g -O0 but often my breakpoints are just not used. I have to type them into the console to get them working. Regularly stepping into a function makes the debugger just continue even though source is available. More often than not setting breakpoints in debug compiled framework code doesn't seem to work at all. Finally today I got this lovely message from the debugger:
| Could not find file /Volumes/Source/srcM/PPCReassembly/PPCReassembler/OS.subproj/MachO.subproj/MachOTransformer.m. Perhaps it was moved or deleted? |
Well lemme check:
-rw-r--r-- 1 nat 100 6140 31 Dec 1999 /Volumes/Source/srcM/PPCReassembly/PPCReassembler/OS.subproj/MachO.subproj/MachOTransformer.m
why, it's right there.
I can't remember having so many problems with XCode 1.1. Maybe I need to reinstall. Apple's installer... hate.... loathe.
I had hoped that developing on my G5 with XCode would be fun, but truth be told I prefer a more reliable workhorse like Visual Studio. VS is not really doing anything fancy, it just has a real nice editor, a very fast compiler and a debugger that just works. The very few bugs and inefficiencies of VS do not prevent me from getting the majority of my work done quickly, which happens to be edit, compile and debug.
XCode on the other hand, neither edits, compiles nor debugs well. The user interface is obscure and clumsy. Make still runs in circles around XCode when compiling. The debugging is broken. - Eclipse on Mac OS X (not on windows) is no real winner either.
Here's a quote off an article from "MacDevCenter" Ten Things I Dig About Xcode:
| 1. New User Interface: The first and most obvious thing you'll notice about the new Xcode IDE is that the Project Builder interface of old has been totally replaced with a new and much more polished UI. The old Project Builder interface was functional--good enough for day-to-day work, but evidently was not something that Apple was happy with. So they brought in their UI experts--the same ones that worked on the new Finder and iTunes--and rethought how the IDE should go together. The result is something that just plain feels a lot more polished and honed. |
I can fully believe that the geniuses behind the new Finder had their fingers in it...