Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Visual Studio and Eclipse
An anonymous reader writes "Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Without waxing too philosophical about IDE design, this article presents the main differences between Visual Studio and the Eclipse IDE."
Hey guys before the flame start the article is not a comparation between VS and Eclipse, it's a Intro to eclipse for VS users...
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
I've been using Eclipse for quite some time now, and must say that it's by far the best IDE I've ever had the pleasure of operating. Because of superior modularity, I can use different Plugins to simultaneously edit projects in C++, Perl, and Fortran with full syntax highlighting and real-time error checking. This saves alot of time in recompiling your apps!!!
The most important thing to me in moving to Eclipse was that it would fully support the Vi command set. There were several different Vi-type plugin options available, but after trying them all I ended up using the only commercial download of the bunch, which was availble for $20 here:
http://satokar.com/viplugin/
The only other IDE I've ever found that was acceptable before Eclipse was Visual SlickEdit, which had most of the same features as Eclipse but was very expensive and didn't have the F&OSS plugin community of Eclipse.
Now that I'm into Eclipse, I don't think I'll ever look back!
-Will the Chill
*please insert 10 cents for one additional sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
But the plug-ins are not of the high standard that the Java development environment is, so there's currently little reason to use Eclipse for C++, C# or VB development unless Eclipse happens to be your favorite text editor (I use vim for anything that's not Java).
It's not a comparison; it's a guide for people migrating from Visual Studio to Eclipse.
What possible features could you be using that require 4 gigs of RAM? I'm not going to pretend Eclipse is lightweight, but I find that it's memory footprint has been under 300 megs. I'm using the WTP Eclipse platform, and shifted a few months back from 3.2 to Europa(3.3). I'll probably be shifting entirely to the Red Hat Development Studio, because it's basically everything I'm using with a bit more, in a nice package. Are you perhaps using version 2? I haven't found a descent relational database management tool plugin for eclipse, and I'm curious if that Oracle plugin is the troublemaker. I've been using Squirrel SQL for the database. I admit this would still be saying 512 megs is really stretching your system, and 1 gig is more like a sensible minimum to be developing on.
Yes, there's an extension which supports Python.
(Oops -- you mean VS supports extensions? But TFA says that's unique to Eclipse!)
Funny, because a lot of times, I find it to be the opposite. While I'm no huge MS fan, I think that Intellisense is much more refined in VS2005 -- and its simple things that make it such... ones that nobody else did, but its obvious once you see it. For example, the fact that when you hit DOT in VS, it goes to the last used property/method rather than the first one in an alphabetical list. I think that quite a few times, I want to refer to the last property that I uses, rather than having to scroll to it. Simple things like that.
It also seems much more of a pain to open an eclipse project on a different machine (at least with the Perforce plugin) than with Visual Studio (I just recently had to have someone else set up one of my Eclipse projects on their new machine, and we got into some sort of recursive look where Eclipse ended up creating subdirectories until it hit an NTFS limit for directory depth (which was a royal pain to clean up -- XP's fault, but still).
I think that much of it is preference, but each can (and should) learn from the other.
I'm anxious to see how X-Code (current and "leopard" release) compare... I've just started using a Mac as my primary development machine (and thanks to Parallels, I can run VS for existing dotnet and C++ development) as well as Eclipse on the Mac. I have not yet figured out how to begin integrating our existing Unix build scripts into X-Code to use it...
What version of Visual Studio are you comparing against? Visual Studio 2005 (which is the basis for the free Express versions, so you can try it out without risking any cash) has all of the features you claim are lacking. It's maybe not as automatic (VS2k5 won't automatically stub a method for you unless you tell it to do so), but IMHO that's a good thing -- I don't want the IDE second-guessing what I'm doing.
Perhaps you were using Visual Studio for C++ code? It's been a while since I've done any C++, having focused almost exclusively on C# for the last 5 years, but with C# the IDE will catch syntax errors, auto-complete for you if you wish (use ctrl+space to bring up intellisense), stub out methods and interface implementations (ctrl+F10 to open the SmartTag-like dropdown), allow you to easily refactor code into methods or wrap variables into Properties, declare "using" tags if you reference something from an assembly in the project references without declaring its namespace (you can alternatively tell it to use the fully-qualifed namespace if you don't want to add it to your "using" list), etc. I would assume that most of the functionality also exists for C++ projects, but I haven't verified that. The functionality is all there (at least for .NET languages), in the box, without any extra plugins needed, and Visual Studio is lightweight enough that I can run 4-5 instances on a 2 year old laptop with 2GB RAM without any issues at all. VS is also pluggable like Eclipse, so feel free to extend it as you wish.
It's been a while since I tried using Eclipse, mostly because I haven't done any Java work since graduating from college back in 2000. When I did last check it out (probably 2-3 years ago) it was horribly obtuse and bloated. I'm sure things have gotten better over the years, and if I had to start working with Java Eclipse would be my first choice of IDE, but in a Windows C++/C# world I'll choose Visual Studio 2005 every single time. (I'd choose Visual Studio 2008, but I was burned by the VS2k5/.NET 2.0 beta and am now wary of beta versions of Visual Studio -- I'll switch when it ships.)
I used to use VC++ for all my C++ development work. I have switched to Eclipse/MinGW.
- There is SVN integration, task integration with Mylyn which can help you focus on only one task at a time, etc. - stuff you simply can't do in VC++ or, if you can, not without paying a lot of money
- The ability to compile one file on each CPU is, laughably, apparently worth $5,000 to Microsoft. Even then, I've heard it doesn't work properly
- I can easily make automated compile/test scripts thanks to switching to MinGW from VC++, and run them automatically on a Linux server which will notify me if a build goes awry
- EASILY extensible. I can compile every bit of the C++ toolset in about 30 seconds, since it is written in Java. If your machine can't run it, you deserve a better machine anyway to soothe compile times...
- The intellisense in both are pretty much comparable with the Europa release.
- If I decide to switch to Linux, all my hotkeys, knowledge, and features are still available.
I could go on and on, but those are the main reasons.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
Try easy eclipse.
Its a 'click here and install' sort of thing. Both for windows and OSX.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) really sped up the autocomplete features... Here's a little review of it. http://rf2-dev.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!33114F6710 97246!136.entry
and the europa site: http://www.eclipse.org/europa/
You should check out VS2008's Javascript intellisense to see what Visual Studio can do with dynamic types. Its not perfect, but its pretty slick overall.Also in .NET 3.5, there's a new dynamic type enhanced runtime, so quite a few dynamically typed languages are popping up for Visual Studio, too.
Not wanting to rain on your parade or anything but just because a platform has Java on it doesn't mean that it will run Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT which uses JNI calls to the underlying window manager - this JNI code needs to be ported to the OS before you can run Eclipse.
You can still run Eclipse on far more platforms than VS...