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Comparing Visual Studio and Eclipse

Posted by kdawson on Sun Sep 02, 2007 05:40 PM
from the path-of-totality dept.
Programming IT Technology
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."
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Submission: Visual Studio and Eclipse compared and contrasted by Anonymous Coward
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  • Eclipse vs Visual (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2007, @05:51PM (#20446087)
    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....

  • That's not a comparation !! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Saija (1114681) on Sunday September 02 2007, @05:52PM (#20446097)
    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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CastrTroy (595695)
      Mod this guy up. Seriously, I don't even know how you would do a comparison of 2 products that don't compete against eachother. Sure the are both IDEs, but one is mainy for Java Development, while the other is for .Net,C++. Comparing features and how easy to do things would be nice, but the major deciding factor for most people will be which programming language they are using.

    • Re:That's not a comparation !! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:42PM (#20446531) Journal
      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.

  • Plugins make Eclipse what it is (Score:5, Informative)

    by Will the Chill (78436) on Sunday September 02 2007, @05:57PM (#20446139) Homepage
    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*

  • hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by El Lobo (994537) on Sunday September 02 2007, @05:57PM (#20446143)
    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.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anrego (830717) on Sunday September 02 2007, @05:58PM (#20446147)
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by smartr (1035324)
      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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by macshit (157376)
      I dunno, Eclipse is certainly bloated, but I run it on a 450MHz PIII system with 512MB of RAM, and it's perfectly usable (debugging fairly hefty programs). The only thing I found I had to disable was the "method completion" (whatever you call it). [This is on a debian system with a 2.6 kernel BTW; less sophisticated systems like windows might need more resources.]

      The version of java you use to run it seems to make big different btw -- I used Sun's java 6/1.6/whatever, but earlier I accidentally tried to r

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by julesh (229690)
      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.

      That's odd... it works fine for me on a 1GB system with a single celeron processor. Yes, it eats a lot of memory (I tend to find about 300MB, compared with about 100MB for VS), but if it's all you're doing with a box I don't see any reason you'd need more than 1GB for it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by julesh (229690)
        Not the mention the huge size of projects compared to how much actual code is present. When it takes me minutes to transfer a project of only a thousand or two lines onto a flash drive, there's a problem.

        Say what? Examining an average project in my workspace, I have 4.2K of eclipse settings files, 55K of source files and 72K of compiled binaries. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and if 4.2K of extra data is taking "minutes" to copy to your flash drive, you probably need a better flash drive.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MemoryDragon (544441)
        Eclipse is more of a toolset, often you have to go plugin shopping, bare eclipse does not bring you very far, and Eclipse Europa while being very extensive still feels unfinished, I usually go for MyEclipse for my Eclipse needs, it always is somewhat better than the pure oss collections. Netbeans however is nicely integrated, everything feels like being solid, but the 5.5 version falls flat on some areas, like db integration, I have high hopes for version 6. Anyway if you want to kickstart with JEE coding

  • Intellisense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by plams (744927) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:09PM (#20446265) Homepage

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by dreamt (14798) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:04PM (#20446691) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Osty (16825) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:28PM (#20446859) Homepage

      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.)

    • The thing I like best about Eclipse vs Visual Studio was refactoring. I tend to, ahem, revise my thinking during programming, and the ability to rename everything from the project itself down to the lowest-level variable was like heaven. Having to go back and use VS where I can't do that (at least, not easily) is torture.

  • Call graphs and type hierarchies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by locster (1140121) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:14PM (#20446305)
    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.

  • What about NetBeans? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theovon (109752) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:08PM (#20446735)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by coryking (104614) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:39PM (#20446927) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • Hot Swapping Code (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MarkEst1973 (769601) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:39PM (#20446931)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndyCR (1091663) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:41PM (#20446949) Homepage
    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.

  • I've enjoyed both (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nate nice (672391) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:56PM (#20447053) Journal
    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.

  • Apples and aeroplanes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rodyland (947093) on Sunday September 02 2007, @10:15PM (#20447905)
    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)

  • One Big Difference: Cross-Platform (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BBCWatcher (900486) on Monday September 03 2007, @12:57AM (#20448865)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by the-stringbean (884738)

      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...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

      • Re:I beleive the technical term is (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kestasjk (933987) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:53PM (#20446617) Homepage
        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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ucklak (755284) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:56PM (#20446641)
        Last I checked, Visual Studio only runs on Windows.

      • Re:I beleive the technical term is (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ls671 (1122017) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:11PM (#20446749) Homepage

        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 (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hedwards (940851) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:21PM (#20446811)
          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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by ls671 (1122017)

            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

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by DuckDodgers (541817)
          I'm fond of the log4j library. Set it up, then litter your code with log statements - logger.error for serious events, logger.debug for reporting nearly every step of the code. First, it documents the code right in the code, and it's much easier to keep the log statements updated when you make code modifications. Second, when something breaks you just change your logging configuration file to turn all logging on for the affected code and re-run your tests. Third, in those (hopefully rare) occasions whe

      • NetBeans (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DuncanE (35734) * on Sunday September 02 2007, @08:30PM (#20447255) Homepage
        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 (Score:5, Funny)

          by SeekerDarksteel (896422) on Monday September 03 2007, @01:58AM (#20449175)
          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 (Score:5, Informative)

            by YU Nicks NE Way (129084) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:43PM (#20446539)
            Yes [msdn.com], there's an extension which supports Python.

            (Oops -- you mean VS supports extensions? But TFA says that's unique to Eclipse!)
              • Yes, Python is dynamically typed, and, yes, intellisense can't work in cases where the signature of a type is changed by the program during execution. That's also true of C#, however; reflection affects all syntactically-driven editors.

              • Re:I beleive the technical term is (Score:5, Informative)

                by Shados (741919) on Sunday September 02 2007, @10:26PM (#20447979)
                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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gangien (151940)
      and Intellij > Eclipse

    • Re:Not Apples to Apples (Score:4, Informative)

      by plams (744927) on Sunday September 02 2007, @06:14PM (#20446307) Homepage
      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).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TopSpin (753) *
      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 p

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