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Visual Studio vs. Eclipse: a Programmer's Comparison
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)."
Out of the box, VS wins hands-down.
A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in ....
A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in anything.
vi.
gedit.
emacs/xemacs
Pencil and paper.
And on very VERY rare occasions, I've seen developers who did everything their head and just typed in any old text editor.
There's no point in comparing the two. There's almost 0 crossover between what they are developing for except for a few Node.JS and C++ developers and even those are pretty rare.
This is not a good sign. A developer with sufficient skills can be productive using vi as her IDE...
"Studio also requires a working set of about 250 megabytes of memory, while Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory..."
Erm, working set on a newly launched eclipse (no project) takes 13x,xxxK.
Plus working set is actually a GOOD thing - in theory. Imagine two programs which each take 700 megabytes running on a machine with only 1000 (and 24). Imagine them sharing some ... libraries, we could call them, of 500 megs each. So the working set would only be 900! Yay! Disk thrash averted :)
Oh, DLL hell? Ah.
Yes.
As far as I am concerned, IDEs are largely similar in their view of software development. They are like bloated bureaucracies that one has to deal with to do anything constructive. If you dare have a project format that VS, Eclipse, or what have you, doesn't understand, and you have to set up the environment to do everything manually. I know I sound like I am saying "Get off my lawn," but I am really saying we need to understand the development process better. IDEs obscure it too much. Tools like VIM and Emacs expose 100% of it. (In full disclosure I use VIM, ctags, make, etc.)
We need to come up with the programmer's equivalent of the SAE and define basic tools of the trade. It will never happen, of course, but that's *really* what we are fighting about.
So the conclusion is "both work; each has some flakiness".
That's a long-winded way of saying "meh".
vi or emacs debates anyone?
Is it important that a tree is equal to a fork? I know it's an exaggeration, but both are useful in completely unrelated ways that doesn't require comparison.
You're comparing an expensive IDE to a free one. I'd be more interested how it compares to a curated Eclipse experience like MyEclipse or a closed source IDE like IntelliJ. All that being said, Eclipse is mostly used by folks using Java or languages that run in the JVM. Visual Studio is going to be used by those on a Microsoft stack.
"One full-time Java programmer told me that he hasn’t had to manually type in any setters and getters in years, and he has a template from which all his objects are typed in automatically, thanks to the code snippet tools in his favorite editor (which isn’t Eclipse—he uses IntelliJ). Clearly, methods of automated typing seem to be a favorite among a lot of programmers. So why did Visual Studio remove a feature that facilitated this? Who knows."
Let's not mention the fact that in C# you don't need to manually type in all the getter/setter junk, just public int MyField {get; set;}
Yes I use IDEs for coding, and I want to be confortable using syntax highlight, shortcuts and fancy tools. But the most important feature I want is to have a professional and versatile debug interface.
This article sounds like the propouse of an IDE is to be super fancy text editor.
From my point of view, the capabilities of Visual Studio for debugging are far better developed than the ones in Eclipse.
- My two cents.
Yes, totally less relevant. Apart from large businesses, medium sized businesses, small businesses, government and home users, absolutely nobody needs to develop software for Windows.
That's a completely different issue. He never claimed that that there is a user group with *zero* Windows relevance, merely that it's getting smaller.
Ezekiel 23:20
VS was the best debugger in the business, and if you're stuck with a legacy code base that's arguably the most important part of an IDE. And back when MSDN was installed with VS (instead of being a web site) it was amazing for its time, because you could select any library function name and with a keystroke get really well written docs for that library function fast. I used to have half my screen for code and half for the doc pane. Once it became wait-a-few-seconds-for-the web-page, that advantage was lost.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Somewhere about 5-8 years ago there was a distinct and obvious transition between MSDN docs written by good tech writers, and MSDN docs clearly written by devs - unsurprisingly this was about the time auto-generating docs from docstring comments became the thing to do.
The docs for the old win32 stuff are still good though. Look at the docs for the famously-silly CreateFile() function. Everything is explained, including all the corner cases, but critically there's also the vital "but you probably just want to do X" hints that are so needed when the docs get this long.
Contrast that with File.Create() which only hints at what the various options do (but at least has proper grammar, unlike some of the seldom-used stuff).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.