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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."
Well, by definition, you cannot see the object if it is eclipsed. If something is visual, you can see it. Easy enough comparison.
Now, to get the folks that can add studio into the equation....
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
Well, I've been using both every day for years now. As always there is no black and white but there is a lot of grey there in between. If I need to chose, I would chose Visual Studio any day. That doesn't mean that it's perfect: it's not, but it simply feels better for my needs. My subjective opinion is that VS feels a lot more "solid" to me, faster and "logical" to my Borland eductated tastes. Havig support for C# is also a big plus to me, but that has nothing to do with the point of the article. Being OS is nota plus in my book, because I really don't prefer OS over commercial or the oposite just for the sake of it... I'm not religious in any shape or form. My 2 euro cents.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Personally I love Eclipse. Working in an environment where I was required to rapidly switch between Perl, C++, Java, and Oracle, Eclipses perspective system is a godsend.
.NET. I think the main reason for this is that Microsoft holds all the cards. They don`t have to accommodate a million developers tool preferences, because they define the tool set. I`m not saying this is a good thing, just that it makes a perfect foundation for building a powerful IDE.
The only problem is it's so damned bloated. It wasn't until I used it on a powerful server-turned-into-a-workstation box that I found eclipse usable. On a standard system, it's just too laggy.
Even disabling some of the heavier features, I find it hard to get any work done when not using it on a system with 4 GB of ram and two processors.
Visual studio on the other hand I think is the perfect IDE for
so you're saying Eclipse eclipses Visual Studio?
Eclipse>Visual Studio
Which would be funny, except that for the languages supported by Visual Studio, the correct version is Visual Studio >> Eclipse.
Eclipse does fine on its home territory as a Java IDE, but the plug-in system is way too disorganised and underpowered for serious development in, say, C++ or C#. Even if you use CDT for C++ work, it's basically hopeless unless you're combining it with GNU tools, and things like the debugging tools aren't even close to the power of VS.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
and Intellij > Eclipse
I've been using Eclipse professionally for some time and the only recent Visual Studio experience I've had has been working on some sparetime C++ project with a buddy. But from that I seemed to notice that the intellisense kind of feature and other assisting tools seem far more evolved in Eclipse. For instance, Visual Studio will sometimes fail to find the members in an object when I type <object><dot> and this rarely fails in Eclipse (unless there's a syntax error).
Eclipse also assists in further ways I'm missing from Visual Studio. It highlights syntax/parser errors, a feature which might seem annoying until you realise that Eclipse will help you solve it. This will save you from a lot of typing effort if you use it to your advantage. If you assign a value to an undeclared variable and press Ctrl+1 on the error Eclipse will offer to declare the variable either locally or as a field. If you instantiate a class, or access a method/field that doesn't exist Eclipse will offer to make a stub for you.
It's features like this that has turned Java from a hideously verbose language into something that's almost easier to develop in than Ruby (imho), and Visual Studio seems almost antiquated on this subject (there's no excuse for not implementing these features for statically typed languages such as C/C++)
I use the call graph and type hierarchy views in Eclipse all the time. They're particularly useful for learning the structure of code you haven't written or come into contact with before and they allow you to navigate code almost effortlessly. Visual Studio's equivalents are pretty dire in comparison, the 'Find References' view just gives a flat list and lists methods with the same name but different signatures and as such I often resort to compiling C# and navigating it with the excellent .Net Reflector tool.
Oh and automatic insertion of import statements and import re-organisation is pretty useful.
Also Eclipse's incremental compilation generally seems to be of a higher quality than VS, e.g. it shows you errors as you type whereas VS does so only after an explicit compilation. VS's incremental compilation appears to be limited to driving syntax coloring of class names and code completion (AKA Intellisense(TM) I believe).
Eclipse's local history of file changes has saved my arse on one occasion (no equivalent in VS) and the file comparer when checking into CVS is pretty cool, far ahead of the (admittedly dated) Visual Source Safe V6 we still use at my workplace (Team Studio was too expensive apparently).
Speaking as a mainly VS user I find that setting up projects in Eclipse can be pretty bewildering at times, but that could just be lack of experience.
Eclipse has *never* crashed on me. VS crashes very occasionally now, but it does still happen.
On balance I would say Eclipse is a far higher quality product than VS, and considering it's free it's a pretty amazing IDE. You can of course get VS Express editions for free now with some functions disabled, multithreaded debugging and compilation for 64bit environments being the missing bits that I have come across.
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.
Yes, there's an extension which supports Python.
(Oops -- you mean VS supports extensions? But TFA says that's unique to Eclipse!)
I use Eclipse for PHP development using PDT, and it's great. Zend Studio Pro costs $299, and comes with debugging support, but you can get the same thing with Eclipse for free, and support various other languages as well.
.NET development, or developing specifically for the Windows platform using an MS supported language then of course VS.NET is the obvious choice, but Eclipse is good too.
If you're doing MFC, or
It's also encouraging that enhancements can be written for Eclipse easily without IBM worrying that your enhancement will stop people upgrading to the Pro edition.
I think that because IDEs for any language all share so many requirements, and because they're used by developers who will want to improve it, it makes a natural open source project, and I expect as time goes on it'll get better and better.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Last I checked, Visual Studio only runs on Windows.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Why do we see do may articles that mention Eclipse as though it's the default IDE for Java development and whatnot, when so many of the professional programmers I know say they prefer NetBeans because it's a more intuitive, less busy interface?
Real programmers do not need debuggers ;-)
Seriously, I have been using eclipse for years and I don't even know how to invoke the debugger. Nothing I hate more than an IDE falling into debugging mode when an error is encountered. A stack trace is fine with me. When really stuck, I insert debugging statement in the code in the relevant places.
Of course, I realize that this is my old way to view things. I also know that modern development teams would go on strike if I tried to impose them an IDE without a debugger ;-)
So, view this as my 2 cents, nothing more ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
That all depends. The suite we were using in CS had a debugger, but it didn't pop up unless I explicitly added the break points. It was an irritating IDE in many ways, so many times I would on short code be left to boggle as to why it wasn't able to read what was typed. Sometimes it would inexplicably fail to read the closing brace even if it were only two lines down.
A good debugger can be a time saver, but one should really only need it if the program is large enough that it isn't clear as to where a variable changes to something naughty. Yes of course, one could do that by hand, but that isn't necessarily the same, every once and a while there is a genuine bug in the compiler or something isn't being done the way that it should be, and paper tracing isn't going to find that.
I would be curious as to how you handle code which is separated into many files to keep things small and comprehensible. Of course each file is easier to fix, but I am somewhat curious as to how you deal with the interactions between multiple source files. And more specifically all of the flipping between source files that can happen with a more complex program.
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 ----
I've used both environments for different tasks and have been happy with both. Essentially, they serve the same function which is to make developing far more enjoyable and error free.
.net and this is shocking since I rarely did MS development before VS 2005.
Personally now I use VS.net more often. From where I work I have an MSDN account and get free downloads of all their developer tools to play around with. So I've spent a lot of time playing with things.
I like the integration of everything. From the SQL browser to Team Foundation Server, it's really streamlined to have access to have everything all at once. Honestly, I've been pretty impressed with most of
Obviously the biggest problem with it all is that it costs money. A lot of money if you want the IDE with all the architecture tools, design tools, testing tools, compilers, SQL server, TFS for source control and deployment, etc. You're locked into a MS environment essentially. And sometimes this isn't a problem at all. Maybe you're developing an ASP.net site or something. But you're spent a lot of money on tools and when multiplied by 50 developers, this can add up to a lot. However, you get MS support and for a lot of business companies with developers that aren't the greatest thing around, this is very valuable.
Eclipse has limitless plug-ins and can do everything VS.net can in terms of hooking into things. I don't find it as seamless and the whole package isn't there for everything from sharing documentation to deployment, etc. And there isn't support either. So a company is essentially on their own. But it's empowering to be able to ala cart the components you want.
I like both but have been really impressed with Visual Studio and all the related tools.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
With debugging statement:
FileThatObject.thatMethod(): x=1, y=2
Of course, you have to be in pretty good control of your code, plan and visualize in advance, before you actually start to write the code so the few times where you will need to write debugging statements is when you made some typing mistake (or almost).
It is a different approach to coding, but it leads to more robust code in my humble opinion. The down side of a debugger is that sometimes, it happens that some developers do not know what they are doing, they start writing code without prior planning and they manage to finally get it to work with the debugger. Typical time consumption ratio will be like 20% for writing the code and 80% to debug it and some bugs will go undetected.
My old way to do things is 50% planning before starting to code, 45% coding, 5% debugging. So the availability of a debugger is less important.
Note that I DO use debuggers if I need to reverse engineer code.
Again, I realize and I know that a debugger has become a standard tool in modern development teams. I am just saying I do not use them often so it is possible to get away without them.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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/
Have you tried NetBeans?
I find it is rapidly over taking VS.Net and Eclipse with things like its improved intelli-sense, built in profiler, tools for building handheld apps and many more improvements.
So you mean it's turned into Emacs?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Maybe if an 'Eclipse for VS users' tutorial was available back then I would have given Eclipse more of a chance, but for something that works straight out of the box, VS had Eclipse beat hands down.
(Disclaimer: I'd spent the previous 2.5 years working with VS)
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.
Here is the list of operating systems that will run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005:
In addition to the list of operating systems above, here is the list of operating systems that will also run Eclipse:
Insightful? While the great Java Development Plugin made Eclipse famous, the C/C++ Tools are now in a state that make Eclipse one of the best C++ IDEs around. They get released the same time as new versions of eclipse, and together with other plugins (Bugzilla Integration etc.) you get a very very powerful dev tool.