Please bring back support for xcplugins!

Originator:ericr
Number:rdar://FB9996400 Date Originated:April 26, 2022
Status:Open Resolved:
Product:Xcode Product Version:All
Classification:Suggestion Reproducible:Always
 
There’s no replacement for traditional bundles that are loaded into the Xcode process. As insecure as they are, they allow developers to improve their IDE as they wish. The public APIs available for Xcode extensions is arguably terrible and does not allow third-party developers to truly improve Xcode. There’s tons of changes I’d love to make through plugins that I currently cannot:
- I’d love to write an Xcode plugin for something like xcodegen so Xcode doesn’t literally shit itself when I xcodegen an opened project
- I’d love to write an Xcode plugin that lets you have more control over the ordering of schemes in the dropdown menu
- I’d love to write an Xcode plugin that adds more integration with Xcode Server
- I’d love to write an Xcode plugin that makes it easier to customize code signing behaviors
- I’d love to write an Xcode plugin that makes it easier to cancel a task that is refusing to cancel
The list goes on and on and on, and I can’t do any of these without brutally mutilating Xcode so that it loads my plugins, and even then, no normal person would install my plugin because of the amount of work required just to run plugins.

Comments

From Apple Feedback – April 27, 2022, 5:13 PM

Thank you for your feedback. We will not providing a transition period for existing Xcode plug-ins, as those were developed using reverse-engineering and have always been unsupported, and we will not be providing a means of loading code into Xcode’s process for security reasons.

Please file requests for the specific kinds of plug-ins you’d like to create, and/or describe the specific kinds of API you’d like from Xcode in order to implement them, if you want us to consider creating out-of-process APIs that you can use to extend Xcode.


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