Rebooting again, everything killed thanks to Xcode4, I thought of xkcd’s comic on “compiling”, and a little modification came to mind:
Appropriately, working with Xcode3 often suffered from time wasted for the weak compiler to churn through relatively tiny projects. We’ve moved on – Xcode4 has a much better compiler/linker/build toolset – but it’s brought it’s own (worse) problem to replace it…
Xcode4 commits IMHO the second-worse (*) sin for an IDE: serious memory / CPU leaks; run it for long enough (as little as 1 hour) and it will crash badly, and drag down your whole computer with it. Since you cannot work without the IDE, this means you waste hours every week just rebooting over and over again. Apparently, OS X has little protection against rogue apps – the whole OS seizes-up, mouse cursor stops working, etc.
Varies from machine to machine, and project to project. e.g. high CPU machines (fast Quad-core) seem to be affected only very rarely (if ever). With some machine/project combos – e.g. dual-core machines around 1.6Ghz CPU – this happens multiple times a day, every day. They’re fast machines, generally – it’s just that Xcode has some fatally bad code somewhere. Xcode3 on the same machines was fine.
(*) – worst sin: data-loss; an IDE that corrupts your source code / build settings. Those just make me lose the will to live.