Xcode vs Visual Studio Code | What are the differences?

Overview

Xcode

Stacks19.4K

Followers14.7K

Votes213

Visual Studio Code

Stacks185.7K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Visual Studio Code vs Xcode: What are the differences?

Visual Studio Code and Xcode are two distinct development environments used by developers. While both serve the purpose of coding, debugging, and building applications, they have key aspects that set them apart:

Language Support: Visual Studio Code supports a wide range of programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, and more. It offers extensive language support through its robust extension ecosystem. Xcode primarily focuses on Apple platforms and provides strong support for languages like Swift and Objective-C.
User Interface: Visual Studio Code features a clean and intuitive user interface, allowing for easy customization and navigation. It provides a minimalist design with various themes available. Xcode, designed specifically for Apple developers, offers a comprehensive interface that integrates multiple tools and utilities for macOS and iOS app development.
Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a thriving extension ecosystem that is constantly updated by its community, offering a wide range of extensions that cater to diverse development needs. These extensions provide additional features and improve the functionality of the software. On the other hand, Xcode's extension ecosystem is more limited compared to Visual Studio Code, despite offering some extensions.
Platform Focus: Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform tool, compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it suitable for developers working on different operating systems. Xcode is exclusively designed for macOS, limiting its availability to Apple developers working on macOS and iOS projects.
Debugging and Testing: Both Visual Studio Code and Xcode have debugging and testing capabilities. Xcode provides a more integrated and comprehensive debugging environment specifically tailored for Apple platforms. It includes simulators and debugging tools that facilitate the testing and optimization of iOS and macOS applications.
Interface Builder: Xcode comes with Interface Builder, a handy visual tool that empowers developers to create user interfaces (UI) for Apple apps with ease, thanks to its drag-and-drop feature. However, Visual Studio Code lacks a similar built-in visual UI design tool like Interface Builder.

In summary, Visual Studio Code stands out as a versatile and cross-platform code editor with extensive language support, a user-friendly interface, and a robust extension ecosystem. It caters to developers working on various platforms and offers flexibility in customization. On the other hand, Xcode is a comprehensive IDE exclusively designed for Apple developers, offering native app development capabilities, seamless integration with Apple's frameworks, and a powerful debugging environment. It is the preferred choice for macOS and iOS app development but is limited to the Apple ecosystem.

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Advice on Xcode, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xcode	Visual Studio Code
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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
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	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 19.4K	Stacks 185.7K
Followers 14.7K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 213	Votes 2.3K
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 Very slow emulator 1 Slow startup	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Cocoa Touch (iOS) Cocoa (OS X)	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Xcode, Visual Studio Code?

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

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 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.

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

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

WebStorm

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

NetBeans IDE

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

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!

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.