I only use Swift for a side project, but I found myself splitting my time between AppCode and XCode. AppCode is nicer in terms of feature set (both in completeness and in my familiarity with the shortcuts), but I find XCode is much faster. If I'm working on something with a bunch of renaming/refactoring/etc, I'll do it in AppCode; if I'm more or less just typing and running tests, I'll do it in XCode.
So, while this announcement is sad, I can't say it's shocking. In other languages I know, IntelliJ products are significantly better than the competitors. For Swift, it's a bit more... meh.
AppCode used to be way better than Xcode in the early days of Swift. And IME has been better at least up to 2020. Did Xcode fix its performance and reliability issues in the last 2 years?
Not entirely, but mostly. The Swift tooling is far more reliable, 3 years ago I was getting noticeable code intelligence failures on hobby projects, 1 year ago I wasn’t noticing it during nearly full time professional iOS engineering. SwiftUI previews were still a little dodgy but getting better every release.
As for performance, it’s basically like any other major macOS app now in my experience. Only caveat might be the git committing which was a bit crap still last time I checked.
IntelliJ software still feels like everything takes 100ms longer than I expect, which makes it feel sluggish even if the heavy lifting is relatively fast.
So, while this announcement is sad, I can't say it's shocking. In other languages I know, IntelliJ products are significantly better than the competitors. For Swift, it's a bit more... meh.