Visual Studio vs. Eclipse: a Programmer's Comparison 543
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell is back with a comparison of Eclipse and Visual Studio, picking through some common complaints about both platforms and comparing their respective features. 'First, let's talk about usability,' he writes, 'and let's be frank: Neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio is a model for sound usability.' That being said, as an open-source project, Eclipse wins some points for its customizability and compatibility with languages; it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years. Microsoft choosing to eliminate macros in recent versions of Visual Studio has also led to some programmer frustrations (and a need for external tools)."
From C++ perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
Eclipse's gcc code parser integration is better than IntelliSense. It actually understand OO code. VS struggles badly with understanding OO code. for example, if every class re-implements one virtual function, VS cannot figure out usage of one particular implementation; even if there are object declared with that class.
Thus VS is good for debugging, for everything else in C++... not much so.
Very differant experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Eclipse however just feels generally clunky. I pause for 20+ seconds just to get code completion prompting to come up in python or java, and half the time its in the wrong context. the perspectives is also really annoying. everytime I go to debug, it halts everything to tell me it wants to switch, and then gives me a 2inch high window for viewing the code, anchoring is weak, and it always seems like I never get back the space I should when I dock a sub-window. Personally I really don't care how extensible my IDE is. any given ide is not going to be able to support all langagues and technologies, so why try to shoehorn it in?
Re:Out of the box (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course everything you described is the bare minimum for a modern IDE. Eclipse does have an advantage because it has more extensions written for it, but both IDEs have a ton (VS is also extremely extensible and has countless extensions written for it too).
But you're not helping your case if you only mention core IDE features. Issue tracking integration? ::GASPS:: stop the press!
Re:Getters and setters (Score:5, Interesting)
Tangential question: What's the advantage of having getters and setters vs. just accessing the variable directly? If automatically generating getters and setters is just an easy/common thing, what function do they really serve?
I've only done OO programming in college (I do embedded C now), so I'm assuming there's some real-world advantage that I'm not aware of.
Re:Netbeans! (Score:4, Interesting)
I concur with this. NetBeans is not attempting to be a generic GUI application platform; it is a mere IDE so it weighs a lot less than Eclipse. I moved to NetBeans because Maven integration with Eclipse is still half baked after all these years; with NetBeans you just open the Maven project and things work correctly. I stayed with Netbeans because it performs better and just has fewer hairs. Eclipse not spamming .project and .classpath all over the place is just fabulous as well.
It is Oracle, however. One day it might cost $6000 per "seat."
Re:Um excuse me ... (Score:2, Interesting)
My friend fired a developer for refusing to use an IDE.
I'm sorry, but no developer can ever be as productive using text editors over IDEs, once they man up and learn how to use them. For instance, renaming a class method that is called by numerous other classes is a 3 second operation in Eclipse, and possibly hours long in bash, with a much higher chance of breaking something. In fact, most refactoring operations cannot be done efficiently outside of an IDE.