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."

Eclipse vs Visual

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....

Re:Eclipse vs Visual

So, what you're saying is that you're better off with a partial Eclipse rather than the full download.

That's not a comparation !!

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...

Re:That's not a comparation !!

Exactly -- I kept looking for the Visual Studio screens and side-by-side comparisons. Nothing. :-S

It's more like Introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio developers.

Re:That's not a comparation !!

LOL wait a minute, I see now that was exactly the page's title... Haha...

Well, it's only the Slashdot summary that's misleading, then.

Not Apples to Apples

I would rather have seen an apples to apples comparison of what VS is used for, ie development in C# or VB. Although Eclipse was primarily designed for Java, like the article mentions, various plugins do exist to C# and VB development (likewise Java development in VS). It also would have been nice to see screenshots of the VS comparison.

The compare and contrast was superfluous at best. This was merely a "my dad's better than your dad" analysis.

Re:Not Apples to Apples

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).

Plugins make Eclipse what it is

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/ [satokar.com]

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*

Re:Plugins make Eclipse what it is

I can use different Plugins to simultaneously edit projects in C++, Perl, and Fortran

Why does your boss hate you?

hmm

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.

Eclipse would be awesome if..

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.

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 .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.

Re:Eclipse would be awesome if...it was compiled?

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 [live.com] and the europa site: http://www.eclipse.org/europa/ [eclipse.org]

Eclipse rules, but the summary != the link.

Eclipse rules, I use it for PHP and Java development. The summary != what is linked to though...

Intellisense

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++)

Re:Intellisense

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...

Re:Intellisense

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++)

What version of Visual Studio are you comparing against? Visual Studio 2005 (which is the basis for the free Express [microsoft.com] 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.)

Eclipse isn't really an IDE anymore

It's a platform for making IDEs among other things.

It's a great platform but it's an utter pain dealing with the plugins and the varying degrees of compatibility. MyEclipse makes it substantially better though.

Re:Eclipse isn't really an IDE anymore

So you mean it's turned into Emacs?

Call graphs and type hierarchies

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.

I have to choose..

Eclipse as my personal favorite. Now granted I'm no programming wizard and I'm not part of some OSS project. I create plugins for The Foundry's Nuke film compositor.

Up until about 4 months ago I used nothing but gedit for all my programming. Then I ran into the problem of to many tabs open and the need for using version control. I like Eclipse with CDT, it does it's job for me and the Subclipse plugin works quit well for my small needs. One feature I really like is the perspectives that Eclipse has, one of the first things I did was setup a few for while I am working.

After I had released only Linux versions of my plugins for a while I picked up a cheap copy of Visual Studio 2005 at a computer flee market. So I setup VMWare to do all my Windows compiling and bug fixing things that would compile ok under Linux but Windows would throw a fit. I agree my opinion isn't based from in depth knowledge or long term use of Visual Studio but for my needs I just prefer Eclipse.

I'm sure Eclipse has its pitfalls just like Visual Studio does, in the end they are both just tools and like anything in this world it comes down to personal preference in the end.

Who would want to compare different religions?

There is so much religion involved on this topic that this discussion is likely to evolve into a big flame war. Some people really like Microsoft products, while other people hate them.

You may call me religious, as I have never really liked products from Microsoft, and my knowledge of Visual Studio is limited.

I use Eclipse on a daily basis and I'm quite happy with the IDE unlike other IDEs I've got to know, like NetBeans.

Having said that, the article from IBM looks fine to me. If we ever get a new employee who knows Visual Studio but not Eclipse, I would point him to it hoping that he would spend a few minutes on it (but no more) and that it would help him getting started a bit faster in the Eclipse world.

total eclipse of the heart

Eclipse does require a lot of computer resources, but when you consider the job it does, its actually an amazing bit of kit. also there are memory management plugin that can keep it under control if are trying to get it to run on a celeron with 256m ram.

as tfa, once you get over the initial hassle of setting the thing up, its a joy to use. also, its dammed stable.

the svn, the code completion, error checking, and the countless lovely little features (i love you all) work a treat, and make it a winner every time. i don't know a single developer thats used both who doesn't recognise visual studio to be a vastly inferior product.

Biggest Thing in Eclipse

Honestly, I think one of the nicest features in Eclipse is the highlighting of a selected object/class/variable. I never realized how annoying using "find" or "bookmark all" was until I moved to eclipse.

A few things

First off, the article is *not* about Eclipse vs. Visual Studio.

Secondly, people keep talking about how Eclipse is used via plugins, mostly, and with plugins, it's better than Visual Studio. Well, if you're going to have plugins/add-ons for Eclipse, let's make it fair and do the same for Visual Studio. Let's toss in Visual AssistX and Incredibuild.

I'm not saying one is superior to the other, since I've never used Eclipse, but I am saying that if you're going to compare them, be fair about it.

What about NetBeans?

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?

I keep trying to like eclipse

But it always feels slightly off. I think half my problem is just their website really stinks. There is no diffinitive "this is eclipse, click here to download". And by download, I mean "setup.exe". Right now it is more like "here is a bunch of random eclipse like stuff with random names and no sense".

Am I right to assume eclipse is kind of like the linux kernel, and you need to pick a "eclipse distribution" to get any kind of coherent package?

Re:I keep trying to like eclipse

Try easy eclipse.

Its a 'click here and install' sort of thing. Both for windows and OSX.

Hot Swapping Code

This is a java-centric feature, but it's something that frustrated the hell out of me when I worked on my first ASP.NET application (v1.1) after coming from a Eclipse/Tomcat environment...

Mix up this recipe:

• Eclipse's autobuild-on-save feature
• JVM's ability to hot swap code (typically accomplished by replacing the classloader at runtime)
• Eclipse's ability to host the container (Tomcat in my case, but it can be WebLogic or any other)

Eclipse starts Tomcat in debug mode by default. Automatically compiled classes in Eclipse are piped over the debug socket to the container. The class is swapped out in real time, and you've got a brand new piece of code to run without having an entire build/deploy cycle. Better than that, you can be stepping through your code debugging a method, see your mistake, fix it, hit ctrl-S to save, and the debugger backs up to the top of the method and evaluates your new code!!!

VS.NET (v1.1 when I used it) simply could not do that. IIS was not as cleanly integrated with VS.NET (as far as I am aware, maybe I'm wrong)

Eclipse plug-ins exist for all major containers. MyEclipseIDE makes a killing marketing a bunch of them. Even IntelliJ (my preference for Java development) cannot match it, because you have to explicitly build (which can hot swap) but it'll take seconds, as opposed to milliseconds in Eclipse. big big fan of the hot swapping ability.

My switch from VC++ to Eclipse

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.

Lack of GUI tools

Seems to be the biggest difference.

Eclipse and folders == el suckedero

I was thinking about trying out eclipse on my C++ projects, but I find this thing of integrating folders and projects to be highly irritating. I like to keep common source files in a directory and include them as needed on different projects. Not every project needs to link to every file in my common directory, but that's how you have to do it in eclipse. I spent a weekend trying to get going with eclipse on ubuntu (visual studio user), but when I realized that I'd have to reorganize my whole code base to have the folders and projects be the same, I got pissed frustrated and had to quit back to windows for a while. Trying to get SVN and eclipse to cooperate is a complete nightmare too. You say you want to check out your whole SVN repository and then work with individual projects within it? Good luck with that. Only top level directories are projects. Gah. There's some hack you can do with making one project that checks out the whole SVN tree, then have another project _outside_your_svn_repository_ that refers to a project within the SVN repository. I guess you have another SVN repository for those eclipse projects?? It makes my head hurt. I've thought about transitioning to eclipse at work, but the idea of revamping the company's whole SVN repository just so folders and projects are identical is just fucking retarded, and I would be justifiably mocked were I to bring up something like that to my coworkers. I want to like eclipse, I really do. This folder thing just sucks too much for me to like it.

Plaintive...

Sounds GRRRREAT! So I download the latest Europa, fire it up. Hmm, it comes with a "hello world" project preloaded. Fire it up!

Oho! Syntax errors! Clever demo, must use editor. Editor works, build again.

Launching helloWorld.... java.lang.NullPointerException...

And this.. is the demo.

Clue me in somebody, please, humbly. What am I missing here?

--
phunctor

I've enjoyed both

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.

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 .net and this is shocking since I rarely did MS development before VS 2005.

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.

Too biased for my taste

I think I'll wait for an article comparing the two from someone who doesn't have a dog in the fight. As much as I'm loathe to use Visual Studio, Eclipse isn't much better. Perhaps the term "sucks less" is apropos.

Building projects automatically

In the article it mentions Visual Studio doesn't do automatic building. Well, that's kinda true. You can however, create a macro that will execute a build every time you press "ctrl-s" or press the "save" button. Visual Studio will only rebuild and re-link what changed, eg. the file you just edited. I did this for one of my projects and it worked pretty well.

Eclipse for C/C++

Eclipse is wonderful for Java. Great completion, "intellisense", etc... However, I really miss what VS has for C/C++, which is basically intellisense for the complete MSDN library. Whenever I've used Eclipse for C/C++, simple things like fopen and printf have no "help". That is the one thing that I would love to somehow see integrated into the CDT.

Apples and aeroplanes

My last job I had the option of choosing my own (windows) development environment. After a day trying to get Eclipse to work, I came to the conclusion that, based on the tutorials and documentation easily available on the web, most people use Eclipse for the purpose of writing Eclipse plugins. All very well and good, unless of course you want to write some code that actually _does_something_.

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)

I cant believe this is on slashdot

I cant believe this article is on slashdot

Eclipse Memory Tip

One of my gripes early on with Eclipse was that it used a ton of memory. One tip to minimize the memory load is to CLOSE THE PROJECTS YOU'RE NOT WORKING ON. I had been using Eclipse for a year before this was pointed out to me. Now that I close all projects but the one I'm working on, Eclipse is about 2-3 times more responsive than before.

I don't know why this isn't brought to the user's attention (via a startup tool tip or something). "You currently have 60 projects. You should close projects you're not currently using." That said, Eclipse is a lot like Photoshop, it will use up whatever memory you give it. For me, the sweet spot seems to have 2GB in the machine I'm using.

I think the Eclipse vs. Visual Studio debate has a lot to do with languages being used than features (it seems to me that both have comparable features).

Confession

I'm an open source fanatic. I prefer open to closed. Long live Linus and Stallman etcetera etcetera...

I use Kdevelop as exclusively as possible Compile in windows on the command line.

Naturally, when chained to a windows machine, I search for a comparative tool. I had been a party to more than one VB monstrosity, and the thought of going back made me want to retch. I used em all. CodeBlocks won out but only just.

The point of this story is Eclipse vs VisualStudio, So my Comparison: Based on previous the release of Eclipse CDT Hated it period next option. (I'll try the new one, but no big hurry) I am a fair person. I tried Visual Studio Express due to its new license. Man was it a breeze. It did exactly what is was supposed to and was completely free and unrestricted. I used it for two projects (1 was an upgrade to a previous VB monstrosity, Oh they all are.) I cant stand the .net framework, But I have to admit if you can stand it Visual Studio is the way to go.

I wish the guys at sharpdevelop and Monodevelop all the best and I know in the end you'll get it just perfect and Microsoft will change Back to real coding hence the codeblocks c++. Nice QT editor for windows. Cannot wait for KDE4 kdevelop on windows.

"Package Explorer"?

You just don't name a piece of software "Package Explorer". It invites jokes up the wazoo (oops, bad pun).

One Big Difference: Cross-Platform

Here is the list of operating systems that will run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2003

In addition to the list of operating systems above, here is the list of operating systems that will also run Eclipse:

• Mac OS X
• Linux
• Windows NT
• AIX
• Solaris
• HP-UX
• QNX
• Any other OS with JRE 1.4.2 or higher.

both are a mess

Both Eclipse and Visual Studio are a mess; programming doesn't need to be that complicated.

Dev-C++ or Geany

I've always preferred the simpler stuff. Geany for Linux and Dev-C++ for Windows, they have a compile/build button and syntax-highlighting (although Dev-C++ only emboldens type clarifiers like int and char). More than enough for me :)

Visual studio is ok

But you have to install resharper v3.0, then you get amazing IDE. As a bonus point, both reshaper and IDEA (by the same company, IntelliJ) use same keyboard shortcuts, so if you do Java and C#, you only have to remember one set of shortcuts.

btw, once you get used to it, you cannot live without Alt-Ins, (vs.net) ctrl-click and ctrl-shift-alt-n :)

Not a shameless plug

This looks like a shameless plug, trying to get you to buy this Eclipse Sucks t-shirt [faroutshirts.com], but really it's just anti-Eclipse evangelism (or is it, "Eclipse anti-evangelism"? ;-). It will fall on mostly deaf ears hear in Slashdot-land, where I expect most people who give a crap about Eclipse one way or the other will be of the uber-geek type who LOVE it.

But, what the hell. Maybe some will get a chuckle out of it. :-)

Here's a bit of the text from the "back of the box" image:

"The first version was the worst. And the second version, that was the worst too. The third version I didn't enjoy at all. After that it went into sort of a decline." -- Marvin, the paranoid android

"Eclipse is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." -- D. Knuth

"I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave." -- HAL 9000

Someone say "release"?

Notice that the comparison didn't talk about actually RELEASING the product.

I've spent some time building an application in SWT, which is reasonably sweet and sophisticated -- however, now that I'm looking to release my application, I'm having to experiment with applications to bundling third-party products, experiment with batch launchers, learning how to manipulate jar files, etc.

I wrote a C# program in VS a few months back, and on top of the immediately present and obvious GUI manipulation tools, the ability to just take my exe and run it on another machine without doing further research was a nice benefit.

Eclipse for OCaml?

Can the enlightened /. crowd tell me if Eclipse also handles (decently!) non-mainstream languages like Haskell or OCaml? I am particularly interested in the latter, and I'm curious to know if this Eclipse thingy will do a better job than vi at handling OCaml programmes.

The indexer is annoyingly slow

I love Eclipse CDT, but in terms of auto-completion speed, it doesn't even compare to Visual Studio (yet). While Visual Studio Express instantly evaluates The . -> and :: operators, Eclipse CDT v3.2.2 uses between 10 to 15 seconds. It has been like this as long as I can remember. Also, the indexer triggers on a lot of weird things, like the operators >> and >, and even freezes when it encounters a new identifier name.
I'm using good old Vim until this is sorted out.
Eclipse is great, so it's sad that this feature alone ruins everything. It's impossible to get work done, when the IDE freezes every other line for 10 seconds.

If anyone knows how I successfully can disable the indexer, please let me know. Neither the option in the project settings, nor the option in the preferences work.

Re:I beleive the technical term is

so you're saying Eclipse eclipses Visual Studio?

Re:I beleive the technical term is

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.

Re:I beleive the technical term is

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.

If you're doing MFC, or .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.
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.

Re:I beleive the technical term is

Last I checked, Visual Studio only runs on Windows.

Re:I beleive the technical term is

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 ;-)

Re:I beleive the technical term is

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.

NetBeans

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.

Re:NetBeans

I decided to try NetBeans about a year and a half back. I have a really good feeling about using it, and I'll tell you all about my experiences with it as soon as it finishes loading. XD

Re:I beleive the technical term is

Yes [msdn.com], there's an extension which supports Python.

(Oops -- you mean VS supports extensions? But TFA says that's unique to Eclipse!)

Re:I beleive the technical term is

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.

Re:Question

Yes, Microsoft worked hard to implement the slowness of Eclipse within Visual Studio.
The latest 2005 editions even come with a set of custom options for configuring your resource hogging.
The flashing file save icon has been redesigned and now displays as an alpha blended bead of annoyance.

Re:I beleive the technical term is

and Intellij > Eclipse

Re:How is IBM an unbiased source?

It's not a comparison; it's a guide for people migrating from Visual Studio to Eclipse.

In A Comparison Between Eclipse and Visual Studio

...KDevelop [kdevelop.org] wins!

Re:Question

There is no doubt it takes a lot of RAM to run Eclipse.

How much of this is due to JRE implementation? I know Sun's JRE likes to load a lot of class code; at one point with 1.5.x I had to manually bump the memory reserved for class code above the default of 64MB while running Eclipse. What fraction of that is wasted on infrequently used code? I also recall not being able to allocate >1.6GB of RAM on 32 bit W2K3 because, according to Sun, their JRE's heap requires contiguous RAM, and 32 bit W2K3 can't provide it in larger pieces, although it would host 2 processes each ~1.5 GB just fine. If the memory must be contiguous, that implies certain inefficiencies such as never releasing unused RAM below the most distant allocation.

Anyhow, I suspect common JREs are using RAM inefficiently. Flushing unused code, releasing unused heap and sharing common code among processes are all commonplace, well understood techniques. Be nice if Sun and other JRE vendors figured out how to leverage them.

Re:Down With IDEs!

Right. Because no one who knows the language makes typos in a method call. No one who knows the language ever forgets to close a parenthesis or drops a semi-colon. Indenting code automatically is stupid pre-optimization--let me hit the space bar myself. Refactoring support? Please! Let me refactor those 4 similar classes by hand--I'm sure I'll get it right. Who needs an IDE anyways?

Ummm, are you on crack? Sorry, but why on earth would you NOT want an IDE? It saves tons of time, prevents easy mistakes, helps you debug your code, helps you keep things organized and on topic, and can promote good habits (for example, assuming "well, you're making a new class--let me set up a unit test outline for you"). What's not to love?

Or do you write all your code in "edit" because visual tools like vi or emacs are for babies?

Re:Question

do you have a 64-bit operating system installed? just wondering. if you do. google for "bug eclipse 64-bit" or similar.

Re:How is IBM an unbiased source?

Aside from the fact that the article isn't comparing the two (rather its an introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio developers), it wasn't written by IBM in the first place. It is merely hosted on IBM's developerworks site, whose contributions come from across the industry.