On Scale and Xcode

Brent Simmons has a write up apologizing for a tweet he wrote the other night, which I retweeted.

“Xcode cannot handle our scale” is the new day and night phones.

— Brent Simmons (@brentsimmons) February 2, 2014

I undid the retweet and made the following remark, partly in jest and partly earnestly.

To be fair, Xcode barely scales to one developer …

— Ash Furrow (@ashfurrow) February 2, 2014

I would also like to apologize to the Facebook team on my snark. Negativity got the better of me, and I’m sorry.

In his post, Brent does a great job of examining some of the details that have come to light about Xcode’s failure to scale in the way that the Facebook team is trying to make it. While I sympathize with the Facebook team, I’m also curious about what else they have tried to make Xcode scale for them.

The original Quora post, which has since been edited, claimed that Facebook is doing iOS development at a scale ten times larger than anyone else. This is easily disproven by the fact that Apple is writing the whole iOS operating system, so Xcode must work for Apple. I wonder what Apple is doing to make Xcode scale to an OS-level that they’re not telling us.


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