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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. IDE
  5. Light Table vs Xcode

Light Table vs Xcode

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Xcode
Xcode
Stacks19.3K
Followers14.7K
Votes213
Light Table
Light Table
Stacks2
Followers20
Votes0
GitHub Stars11.7K
Forks916

Xcode vs Light Table: What are the differences?

What is Xcode? The complete toolset for building great apps. The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building amazing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

What is Light Table? It features real-time feedback allowing instant execution, debugging and access to documentation. It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

Xcode and Light Table belong to "Integrated Development Environment" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Xcode are:

  • Source Editor
  • Assistant Editor
  • Asset Catalog

On the other hand, Light Table provides the following key features:

  • Free and open source
  • Cross-platform
  • Lightweight

Light Table is an open source tool with 10.8K GitHub stars and 913 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Light Table's open source repository on GitHub.

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Detailed Comparison

Xcode
Xcode
Light Table
Light Table

The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building amazing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

Source Editor;Assistant Editor;Asset Catalog;OpenGL Frame Capture;Version Editor;Interface Builder Built In;iOS Simulator;Integrated Build System;Continuous Integration;Instrument Library;Command Line Tools
Free and open source; Cross-platform; Lightweight; Modern, smart UI with minimalist interface; Auto-complete; Inline evaluation; Customizable with themes and plugins; Split views and instant feedback.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
11.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
916
Stacks
19.3K
Stacks
2
Followers
14.7K
Followers
20
Votes
213
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 130
    IOS Development
  • 33
    Personal assistant on steroids
  • 29
    Easy setup
  • 17
    Excellent integration with Clang
  • 3
    Beautiful
Cons
  • 6
    Massively bloated and complicated for smaller projects
  • 3
    Horrible auto completiting and text editing
  • 1
    Slow startup
  • 1
    Very slow emulator
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Cocoa (OS X)
Cocoa (OS X)
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver
Solis
Solis
WakaTime
WakaTime

What are some alternatives to Xcode, Light Table?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

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