Is XCode4 GM safe for production?

Question

Is XCode4 safe for production apps? I would like to make the change, but not sure if it will break, or cause problems working on production?

Answer 1

I'm currently doing a research project investigating libdispatch.h's performance in comparison to sequential and posix threaded approaches, and decided to exclusively use XCode 4 since their first preview release and can say that the GM is leaps and bounds better than any of the previous releases. That being said, it still crashes unexplainably on me, often when doing simple GIT operations or changing views. I've only had one crash that I felt was okay for a GM, because I was testing something rather harsh.

XCode 4 GM overwrote my XCode 3 installation, none of the previews did this, and it even kept the preview release installed. This was a surprise to me because I upgraded as soon as it released, they may warn you now.

I get lost in the UI still, even though they tried to make it simpler. Good luck finding help on specific features of XCode4 also, there's not a lot of information on it yet, as to be expected. In production environments, this could be tragic.

I briefly toyed with InterfaceBuilder but it really put me off, I couldn't find anything I looked for. I did not use IB long enough or read the help documentation enough to pass judgement on it though.

All that being said, I'm still actively using it and have gotten used to it. I have no plans on going back to 3, but wouldn't recommend making the production leap yet, unless you really need the new compiler support or instruments.

Answer 2

If you're serious at all about having a solid production environment, then you need to also be serious about your staging environment: one where you can emulate in (almost*) perfect detail the production environment.

Deploy to staging in the exact same (hopefully automated?) manner as you would to production. Then you can tell for yourself if it will break.

Breaking stage is cheap, because no one is losing time while it's down (except possibly other developers.)

Breaking production ... not so cheap, for rather obvious reasons.