Xcode frustration

MacOSX and iOS
1

We are working for a few years with Juce and Xcode now, and things are getting more and more worse. Today I discovered that there is no autocomplete in the modules anymore… We are reaching the point where developing Juce in Xcode is almost undoable and where it’s time to move to another IDE, Platform or Framework.

I know Apple focuses on Swift for their IDE and features, and that C++ is difficult to parse, but I’m hoping not to have to kill any of my darlings and to be able to stay working on this set up, but this leaves us no other options. I have a brand new Mac, latest macOS, Juce 6 etc…

Does anyone has any tips on how to make Xcode work for C++?

Or have we reached the limit and is this the end of a long marriage?

2

I feel like that myself, with Xcode, not JUCE. I think I’m going to start using CLion on OSX. I’ve used it quite a lot for JUCE dev on Linux and I’m pretty happy with it.

1 Like
3

Exactly. This is a problem of XCode not JUCE. I don’t understand why even old CodeBlocks on Linux can have its autocomplete working while XCode doesn’t. Visual Studio is years ahead now when comes to C++ handling.

3 Likes
4

I tried Xcode12 Beta and code completion seemed better, however i think i may have felt that before when I tried XC11

5

Code complete works for me, but it just very, very slow. If I give it 5s or so it does tend to come up with stuff most of the time, but agree it’s useless when typing. Unless of course I’ve typed in 90% of what I need to then it helpfully comes up with the last 2 characters.

3 Likes
6

Yesterday I stopped the debugger in the middle of a function in Xcode, and the local variables couldn’t be seen, plus some didn’t show up in the ‘locals’ list - I thought seeing values was pretty fundamental in a compiler / debugger.

8

I’ve just downloaded and installed Xcode 12:

Screenshot 2020-07-01 at 13.48.36
Screenshot 2020-07-01 at 13.48.361212×252 41.9 KB

9

do you get the spinning wheel in the window? this can take quite a while to settle sometimes…

10

No, no spinning wheel. Is it supposed to give variable values when I hover over them, like on VS?

11

yes, on the top level variables anyway (i.e. on vs if you hover over val in class->val it’ll show val, but in xc you have to hover over class and drill down)

12

Thanks. It’s not giving me any information on local variables, which I found very irritating yesterday.

I also want to be able to highlight and select columns of text, but that was removed from about version 3 I think. Alt-shift on VS is incredibly useful at times.

Question: Can’t we use VS on Mac now?

13

Visual Studio is not compatible with Mac, but VS Code is & autocomplete works very well on it for JUCE. Also, it is free.

Edit: Note that in my experience, using VS Code is better if you are using CMake.

I haven’t used CLion, but I did try the other one…AppCode(?) and it was ok, but not completely better and it is not free.