Open Radar

 
This is a duplicate of radar #34875798

Xcode should be open source so that iOS and Mac developers can help improve the tools they rely on to do their jobs. It is severely limiting, and frustrating, to not be able to contribute to my tools in iOS when I see my colleagues in the Ruby and JavaScript worlds doing so.

Now, I know open sourcing Xcode is a hard sell. I mean, it's decades old and would need to be audited and stuff before the lawyers take over. So, here's an alternate suggestion: start a ground-up rewrite of Xcode. Microsoft did this with Visual Studio -> Visual Studio Code, and it's become one of the most popular text editors to date. Here's the idea: a simple, barebones IDE that uses an extensible plugin architecture to interoperate with the closed components in Xcode. You can keep the parts of Xcode secret that need to be kept secret, but still allow the community to help improve it.

Just think of how nice it would be! All the hacks in Xcode, the intermittent bugs you can't reproduce, the ugly code there's never time to fix. All gone. A green field, fresh rewrite of Xcode and this time Apple's engineers aren't alone: they have the community suggesting ideas, fixing bugs, and helping them improve the tooling.