Looking into Xcode 14 beta 1

It is a WWDC week and the first day is over. I am eager to see what Xcode 14 is about to bring and therefore let’s dive into Xcode’s release notes where I pick out some of the changes which caught my interest.

Bitcode is deprecated

Turns out that bitcode is deprecated. In the release notes we can read that bitcode for iOS, tvOS, and watchOS is turned off by default. In addition, bitcode uploads are going to be rejected when using Xcode 14. That is the one I did not expect to change, but it did.

Single 1024*1024 app icon

Whoever has dealt with app icons are going to be happy to hear that in Xcode 14 we can just use a single image for the app icon. Of course, the option is going to be there for using separate images for each of the sizes who need it.

Better parallelism in build system

Release notes mention that Xcode 14 can build targets in parallel with their Swift target dependencies. Sounds like we can hope for faster builds.

Recommended deployment targets

There are new build settings like RECOMMENDED_IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET etc. Not sure yet what are the default values, since I did not find them in Xcode beta 1. But still, interesting addition.

Shell script sandboxing

There is a new build setting ENABLE_USER_SCRIPT_SANDBOXING for turning on sandboxing in shell script build phases.

LLDB swift-healthcheck

It is a frustrating when using a debugger and then any expression is resolving. Seems like there is a way to investigate these issues and possibly solve them with the new swift-healthcheck command. I am gonna definitely check it out.

Interface builder is not forgotten

The platforms State of the Union mentioned Swift and SwiftUI being the future of building apps. But on the other hand, there are multiple changes happening in Interface builder as well. More options and more supported views.

Swift packages and localization

At my work, we have struggled with Swift packages which contain localization. The only way for importing and exporting localizations was having Xcode project only for that. Happy to see that xcodebuild -importLocalizations and -exportLocalizations work with Swift packages.

Better reloading for SwiftUI previews

Many items about improving SwiftUI previews and reloading them when making edits. Sounds like there is going to be less need to trigger render preview manually. That is really nice.

Xcode Server is deprecated

As Xcode Cloud is not any more in beta, Apple is removing Xcode Server from Xcode 14.

That is a quick overview of things coming with Xcode 14. There is so much more. Feel free to dig into Xcode 14 release notes yourself as well.

If this was helpful, please let me know on Mastodon@toomasvahter or Twitter @toomasvahter. Feel free to subscribe to RSS feed. Thank you for reading.