Xcode 9 is Unacceptable

In my work project, after a long struggle, it turned out that a wild

typedef NS_ENUM(BOOL, ...

defined inside 3rd party dependency objc code, which was also used in swift was causing autocompletion failures and segfault during compilation.

You can actually try to dig into the segfault log after failed compilation (e.g. after making a typo in swift code). There should be a common place listed there at the end, where you should look for unconventional things, for example:

1.  While type-checking 'init(for:)' at <filename:line here>
2.  While type-checking declaration 0x7fc1ae21e3c8 at <filename:line here>
3.  While type-checking expression at <filename:line here>
4.  <filename here>: importing '<some symbol here>'
5.  While type-checking expression at [<invalid loc> - <invalid loc>]

Search in file that you see in last 1-2 points and try to figure out what could be an offender there. Hope it'll help.

After fixing this place, the autocompletion works now, a bar with "unexpected error occured" is no more displaying and if you make a mistake somewhere the compiler does not segfault.

Probably it might help to someone: when XCode freezes on compilation or during some other activities - you can try to kill SourceKitService process and then Xcode become responsive again. Saves me hours of debugging.

I completely feel you man. I actually have a feeling a few people here are not iOS developers but rather Xcode developers or some Apple people trying to say they have no issues.

This software is so bad and is getting worse every day. Not just Xcode, pretty much all of apple software. They have no idea even how to use their own tools. Let me give you a nice example:

I wanted to see how Apple handles popovers on iPad when orientation changes. It took a bit to find one but if you open a simple Notes app on iPad, press on one of the top buttons that opens a popup and then rotate device you will see that it is not handled at all, it is bugged, it changes position and becomes a mess! Then their weather app keeps acting off, you need to kill it and relaunch it sometimes to actually see any data. The mailing apps are a joke (on OSX I need to restart if from time to time even)... Even as I am writing this sometimes the position where I am writing jumps back up somewhere in the middle of the text! Wow Apple, this is unbelievable!

Anyway, Xcode is the champion of them all. I have been a professional iOS developer for 8+ years now and have seen quite a few things. I think most issues came to Xcode with introduction to Swift and even now the Objective-C projects work extremely well (I still have a few that need support). There is no excuse like "it works for some", I do not believe it! I have a company here with multiple developers on different computers, different projects, settings, requirements...

Next to that I know loads of people from different companies, different locations around the world and I have failed to find one single person who is experiencing no issues with Xcode 9. I do admit that projects that have less dependencies like cocapods work better and Objective-C projects have great benefits. Stiall thias ias nao excuase faor creaating suach catastraophic IDaE. <-- I had to obscure this statement otherwise it gives "Invalid characters error"!?

Xcode is slow? This is not slow, this is "not working". In many cases the project just keeps rebuilding itself, indexing is failing, code coloring is failing, autosuggest is a joke...

But there is much more:

- I get way too many times when app fails to install for different strange reasons so you need to rebuild

- It loses connection to device and you need to reselect it

- It fails to build for any stupid reason (file size zero) and even worse it does not indicate it. It sometimes just start rebuilding and I am waiting for the app to start on my device while the prosess has stopped quite some time ago.

- When running and you re-run it it will show "cancel" dialog which does not work so you need to "cmd+r"+"esc"+"esc"+"cmd+r"..(repeat a few times).. (this issue was already somewhere on Xcode 8)

- IDE crashes few times a day

- You need to force-quit Xcode few times a day as it gets stuck somewhere

...

But wait, these are the issues that should never happen. But what about all the rest that is supposed to work in Xcode?

- @IBDesignable works only if you use it every second tuesday or something like this (seriously this thing is so unstable)

- Autosuggest of code has been a joke ever sine Swift started

- Publishing to app store through Xcode (instead of application loader) works for about 10% of users

- Provisioning profile and certificate management is a joke. A prank they pull every year by changing it to "better" effectively making it worse

- What happened to dragging files into project from finder in Xcode 9? Suddenly they are not automatically added as source!!!

...

Then there are Swift related things. I started with 2 because there was no need to use it earlier and I still prefer Objective-C for many things:

- Migration from 2 to 3 was not really much of a Swift change then it was a change in the standard library interfaces. The method names have changed and that is why we spent in average 2 days per project for migration!?

- Migration to 4 is a bit smaller but again there is just stupidity mostly with keys and idiotic changes like making constraint priority a concrete structure instead of keeping an integer or whatever

- We got new class like String which lost loads of functionality that is still in NSString. But wait, NSString tools still return String instead of NSString so we need to do like ((("name.txt" as NSString).deletingPathExtension as NSString).appendingPathComponent("addedName") as NSString).appendingPathExtension(".dat").

...

(At this point here I must have written too long of a comment because the page is starting to jump-scroll to top for every letter I add)

Reading all these posts was very sad, but also at the same time so helpful. I was so sure it was my old Macbook Air and it only having 4 gigs of memory, and that was why XCode was running so poorly, as it uses so much memory and the system was building up rather large paging files to try to deal with it. However, I can confirm, that 2 brand new $2000 Mabook Pros with 16 gigs of memory have been running their fans pretty much non stop trying to keep XCode moving along. As soon as I quit XCode everything is back to normal again. If I have an error that is left unfixed as I am completing typing some code out, the memory issue gets even worse, and things begin to hang up and load slower and slower. I do have a big project, but it should not be bringing a brand new $2000 machine that I could barely afford to purchase, to it's knees on an hourly basis. I use CocoaPods a lot and can't even beging to explain what a pain in the **** issues with pods have been, as with every version of XCode I see more and more issues with Pod files I'm using, which leave me the option of adding them to my project manually or removing them. At least if I add them to my project manually I can update the code Apple claims needs to be updated. I have reguarly updated the pod file to make sure Im using the newest versions too. I really think the main issue I am having though, is with IBDesignables demanding a tons of resources from the storyboard to render just for design purposes. There is zero errors and warings in any of my IBdesignables, so not sure why that would be. If my iPhone runs the app that this code generates with zero probelmes and all my pods and IBdesignables work as expected, why the **** is the same project bringing my less than one month old, brand spankin new MacBook Pro to its kees, because XCode has memory issues and it's getting outrageouly bad. I love the new simulator look, but besides that, everythig else is worse, and it uses tons of of resources. What I mean by that is, with nothing else open, besides the HomeKit Simulator and Regular iPhone 7 Simulator, XCode should never be taking up 8-10 gigs or more of memory, I dont care what I have open in XCode. How much memory does it take to run the app on my iPhone, oh ya, not even close to that much?? Apple needs to fix XCode obviously!!!!!!! Also, change the device requirements for XCode to be a 16 gig machine at this point, unless you can actually get XCode running well on 4 gigs of memory, which nothing thus far makes me believe you can, because a 4 gig Macbook Anything, will have to create such a huge paging file in this scenario, that nothing else functions correctly. This is really getting embarrasing at this point. How is a kid for example, without a brand new expensive Mac, ever going to be able to learn to code, when he has to worry about XCode crashing or hanging up the machine so bad, it has to be force quit almost DAILY???????????????????????????????????? Also, seeing as much of coding requires Internet research during the process, this is a great time to mention the memory management issue Safari has with YouTube. If left open for long enough YouTube often causes isses in Safari with memory, so trying to watch YouTube videos on a coding topic I'm researching, is getting increasingly more difficult, the worse Apple lets XCode get here. I thought with a brand new machine it would be a lot better, but only a little, and most deifnitely not $2000 better!!!!!!! I have debated downloading the developer beta of XCode 9.1 beta 2, as it's really that bad, but they have never been any better in the past, so I'm probably going to wait for the next public update. Come on guys. Get it together please!!!!

I just found time to work on some stuff, and this was the first time I tried the new Xcode version 9. Many projects were broken by it, others worked for a while and then started to get strange errors that would come and go, without any particular reason. I.e. build and run, the app was running working just fine. Building and running again, with no change, and then it doesn't want to run — it just says 'finished running', and the debugger says 'Message from debugger: unable to attach'.

Trying to figure out what was wrong I started a completely new project, same result ... at this time I pretty much can't do anything with Xcode. Even newly created projects won't run, or will run 2-3 times, and then Xcode decides it doesn't want to play ball anymore.

As of this moment Xcode 9 has rendered my ability to work at a complete stand-still. I'm not sure if I am missing something, but it seems the errors are pretty much random. I can't induce the error, as it seems to happen by chance. Once it kicks in, the project won't run at all. Tried cleaning project, checking provision profile, etc. — nothing seems to affect the issue, other than Xcode itself.

Have you a free or paid licence ? Free licence are valmid only a short period of time.

May be you should reinstall XCode or try XCode 9.1 beta.

what??? Xcode has always been free to use. Are there new restrictions on its use??? :O

Yep, just look at the 9.1 Beta 2 release notes. 5 issues fixed, 2 in testing and 3 in simulator. All relatively minor. But the fantasy is that there are only 12 known issues. What a joke. Releasing betas for Apple seems to be a marketing ploy aimed at getting people to feel that Apple is responsive. The purpose of Beta 2 release was because it was on the schedule, not that it really fixed any major problems, at least problems that I have daily.

In order to avoid the force quit issue, I quit Xcode every 2 hours, then run a script that deletes all xcode caches, derived data, and resets all simulators. If I am going to do any serious refactoring, I do it with BBEdit. If I don't then when I am copying and pasting functions, xcode just goes off into never, never land.

Sorry, I meant free Apple Developer account not Xcode

+1
SourceKitService gets > 25GB ⚠ every ~25 minutes here.

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.