xcodebuild is slow; have you investigated using XCBLoggingBuildService?

[luxmentis]

Hello,

So as we know, xcodebuild is slower than building in Xcode. Turns out Xcode uses a process called XCBBuildService, which has me wondering if there's some way of using that to get the better performance outside Xcode.

For context, I'm not a Neovim user but am keen on building Apple apps outside Xcode for reasons we no doubt all agree on (-: I've started to look into this in the past, but as you know it can suck up a lot of time. I've just come across the Zed editor which has me thinking about it all again.

Relevant stuff I've encountered so far (not in any depth):

• Tuist have a project that lets you look at the traffic between Xcode and XCBBuildService
• Fleet (Jetbrains editor under development) launches an XCBBuildService so presumably they're doing this (although Fleet is very much a work in progress)
• With the recent open sourcing of Swift Build, it has been / will be renamed SWBBuildService. In that project there's a framework and even a command line tool for talking to the service. If nothing else that would presumably help shed some light on the protocol.

You've obviously spent a lot of time figuring out this ecosystem. I assume you've already encountered XCBBuildService. Did you consider trying to build with it for better performance? And taking a further step back, any thoughts on the opening up of Swift Build and its relevance here?

Obviously talking to this service would be substantially more difficult than launching xcodebuild with some arguments!

[wojciech-kulik]

Interesting, I didn't know about the tool from Tuist, I will check it out.

I contacted Apple via Feedback Assistant about xcodebuild performance, but they only confirmed that it will be slower, because each time xcodebuild needs to load and initialize the project.

Another reason why it's slow is that xcodebuild tries to contact Apple servers, fortunately, there is a workaround for that and it's a built-in feature of xcodebuild.nvim: #201

Regarding Swift Build, Swift/Apple is pretty bad at documenting their tools. I still don't even understand what is Swift Build, how they are going to use it, and if we can utilize it somehow. Maybe they are going to migrate xcodebuild but who knows, they share 0 details. I think I'll wait until they provide some reasonable documentation.

You've obviously spent a lot of time figuring out this ecosystem. I assume you've already encountered XCBBuildService.

I've encountered XCBBuildService, but I haven't tried to do anything with it, because I didn't know about the tool from Tuist and low-level reverse-engineering wasn't worth it in my opinion. But now when I know about this tool I may check out what's flying there, who knows, maybe I will spot something. However, IMO, the best what we can hope for is Apple migrating xcodebuild to some better solution like maybe Swift Build.

[luxmentis]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I'd seen that you'd contacted Apple. Classic Apple response, telling you only part of the story – and not even the most relevant part. It doesn't make things any easier! I'm also using the /etc/hosts workaround, although manually for now.

I've only just got into this and feel like I'm operating in the high-level / know-nothing arena. I don't yet know whether it even makes sense to talk about getting performance gains by using XCBBuildService – I'm just exploring for now. Will try and make some headway when I get the time.

[wojciech-kulik]

Great and thanks for sharing it! Always nice to learn something new.

I ran that Tuist tool, but it seems like a black magic. To do anything with that, it would require a serious reverse engineering. On top of that, I think it would be very hard to provide a stable solution using that and any change in the protocol could break the functionality.

I think the effort needed to do that is too big if compared to the possible performance boost. However, if you got time and like digging in such things I would be happy to track your progress 💪

[luxmentis]

Yes I know what you mean. It might be possible to talk to the service at a higher level; I'll post back if I find anything out.