Nuclide vs Xcode: What are the differences?

Developers describe Nuclide as "An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom (by Facebook)". A unified developer experience for web and mobile development, built as a suite of packages on top of Atom to provide hackability and the support of an active community. On the other hand, Xcode is detailed as "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.

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

Some of the features offered by Nuclide are:

• Remote development. At Facebook, our web and back-end engineers work on remote development servers in our data centers. Nuclide provides a pair of packages that allow connections over SSH to a lightweight node daemon on the server, making possible remote file editing and syntax/type validation. Of course, this also works for VMs, enabling local development on HHVM, for example.
• Hack language support. The Hack codebase is one of the largest at Facebook. First-class Hack support — including syntax highlighting, type-checking, autocomplete, and click-to-symbol features — has been an important requirement on Nuclide from the start. We're also excited that the growing Hack community outside the company will be able to enjoy dedicated IDE support.
• Flow support. For both local and remote JavaScript development, Flow has brought type integrity and the ability to quickly refactor our React components and apps. As it does for Hack, Nuclide supports Flow-specific decorations and editor features in @flow-annotated files.

On the other hand, Xcode provides the following key features:

• Source Editor
• Assistant Editor
• Asset Catalog

"Remote development with SSH" is the primary reason why developers consider Nuclide over the competitors, whereas "IOS Development" was stated as the key factor in picking Xcode.

Nuclide is an open source tool with 8K GitHub stars and 745 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Nuclide's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Xcode has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1051 company stacks & 603 developers stacks; compared to Nuclide, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.