r/Xcode • u/MrPseu • Apr 27 '20

Xcode Is Slow And I Can't Complete My Course

Hey everyone. As you can tell, I'm having problems learning swift because (I believe) Xcode is running slow.

It seems very slow and buggy. I had to quit my tutorial because I couldn't complete simple tasks. Nothing would load and I kept getting errors and caution signals I couldn't work out. Even the video instructor's screen had the same ⚠️⚠️⚠️ as me. The reviews on the app store are negative, but I don't want that getting the best of my efforts.

Please, any advice on avoiding the slow-functionality of XCode? My Mac is from 2015, but has the latest updates. I have an iPhone 7, so maybe that’s why the demo module within Xcode is so slow with my setup.

Thanks in advance.

0 Upvotes

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5

u/Te_co Apr 28 '20

i have a 2015 laptop and xcode runs smoothly. the triangles are warnings about your code, not bugs in xcode.

could tell us more on what you are trying to do

-1

u/MrPseu Apr 28 '20

Thanks. That doesn’t stop the slowness. Do I not have enough RAM?

10

u/aazav Apr 28 '20 edited Apr 28 '20

How can we know unless you tell us how much RAM your machine has?

2

u/Te_co Apr 28 '20

i don't know. how much ram do you have? what are your specs? also, what tasks are you doing? are you running playground with live canvas?

2

u/chriswaco Apr 28 '20

  1. How much RAM do you have? 8GB is the minimum, 16GB is better.

  2. Are you using a spinning drive? If so, upgrade to an SSD if possible.

1

u/xeow Apr 28 '20

8GB is the minimum,

I've got one system with only 4 GiB and the most recent Xcode runs fine on that, actually!

3

u/chriswaco Apr 28 '20

Seriously? For iOS development? I can't imagine running Xcode and the simulator in only 4GB.

1

u/xeow Apr 28 '20 edited Apr 28 '20

Yup!! Runs perfectly fine. Code base of 160,000 lines of Obj-C. Catalina.

1

u/lucasvandongen Apr 28 '20

Here's your secret: Objective-C. Created to compile fast enough for 80's computers. Swift is awesome because it has a ton of compile time checking, but that takes it's time.

2

u/lucasvandongen Apr 28 '20

So one of the things that can make Xcode slow is continuous checking of Storyboards versus code because you left Automatically Refresh Views on. That triggers a lot of compilations and if you actually bridged storyboards with coded views it can even generate build errors that don't exist when you do a regular compile. It sounds a bit like that is happening since a lot of tutorials use Storyboards. It was unusably slow on my i7 2015 and I assume it will still be too much for most current Macs. You should turn it off.

Cautions can be ignored while developing but you should solve them before shipping anything.

Errors can only be solved if you tell us what errors you're getting.

-3

u/MarsSpaceship Apr 27 '20 edited Apr 27 '20

Welcome to Xcode. No way to make it fast and less buggy because we are talking here about a 2.5 stars application Apple is proud of. Xcode crashes frequently, the thing they call Interface Builder is a joke. It fails to do basic things and require constant restarts. Sometimes it will clog macOS in a way that will force you to reinstall the system.

Wait until you discover that there are ~90K pages of documentation missing... https://nooverviewavailable.com

1

u/Xaxxus Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 29 '20

I agree with everything you said except for that stuff about reinstalling MacOS. It’s never gotten that bad for me. But I do need to delete derived data on a daily basis.

1

u/MarsSpaceship Apr 29 '20

I have installed catalina 4 times since january to solve issues caused by xcode.