>Why don't you consider the need for LLVM+clang and the subsequent huge amount of work indicative of an uphill battle to retrofit the IDE?
Well, I'm not sure about the "huge amount of work". We just saw some release from Apple and that was it, we had XCode 4. Shouldn't have taken that much, more like 2 years or something for everything, considering that was around the time Apple started using LLVM.
They did retrofit it, but only because they had a more basic IDE before. Not because something in the language particularly prevented it.
It took the Eclipse project a few years to build their first version of the IDE too.
Well, LLVM+clang first needed to be built up to be suitable for such an integration (on and off Apple's dime).
I contrast the general situation with something like C# which is on record as being designed from scratch to have synergy with Visual Studio, not the other way round. This general quality shines through while developing with it.
For example, the wonderful LINQ language feature: Statically typed declarative operations on any data. You write these 'reversed' compared to SQL and in return that means each stage can be fully auto-completed.
Back in Obj-C land AKA Jurassic Park, code's full of things like 'IBAction' and 'IBOutlet' which are C macros #defined to void or whatever, just to help the tools out.
But, like I said, Apple ecosystem developers still manage to produce good results. All things considered, OS X / iOS are the best platforms from a user perspective, IMO :)
Why don't you consider the need for LLVM+clang and the subsequent huge amount of work indicative of an uphill battle to retrofit the IDE?