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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. IDE
  5. Eclipse vs Visual Studio Code

Eclipse vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Eclipse
Eclipse
Stacks2.7K
Followers2.3K
Votes392
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Eclipse vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Eclipse and Visual Studio Code are both popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) used by developers for coding, debugging, and building applications. Here are some of the key differences between Eclipse and Visual Studio Code:

  1. Language Support: Eclipse is mostly used for developing Java applications, but it also supports other programming languages like C++, Python, and PHP. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code supports a wider range of programming languages such as C++, Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more.

  2. User Interface: Eclipse has a more complicated and cluttered user interface compared to Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code has a cleaner and more user-friendly interface that is easier to navigate.

  3. Plug-in and Extension Ecosystem: Eclipse has a vast number of plug-ins and extensions available for developers. However, Visual Studio Code has a larger and more active ecosystem of extensions and plug-ins that are constantly being updated.

  4. Debugging: Both Eclipse and Visual Studio Code have robust debugging capabilities. However, Visual Studio Code's debugging features are generally considered to be more user-friendly and easier to set up.

  5. Performance: Visual Studio Code is generally considered to be faster and more lightweight than Eclipse. This is because Eclipse is built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and has a heavier memory footprint.

  6. Community Support: Eclipse has a large and active community of developers, but Visual Studio Code's community is even larger and more active. As a result, developers using Visual Studio Code have access to more resources.

In summary, Eclipse has a broad range of language support and is highly customizable, but can be resource-intensive and has a steeper learning curve. VS Code is lightweight, fast, and has an intuitive user interface with a large and growing extension ecosystem, but has fewer advanced features compared to Eclipse and limited support for legacy languages.

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Advice on Eclipse, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
christy
christy

Program Manager

Jul 1, 2020

Needs adviceonPythonPythonEclipseEclipseIntelliJ IDEAIntelliJ IDEA

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

2.03M views2.03M
Comments
Manabu
Manabu

CEO, Co-Founder at WinguMD

Jun 13, 2020

Decided

I originally chose IntelliJ over Eclipse, as it was close enough to the look and feel of Visual Studio and we do go back and forth between the two. We really begin to love IntelliJ and their suite of IDEs so we are now using AppCode for the IOS development because the workflow is identical with the IntelliJ. IntelliJ is super complex and intimidating at first but it does afford a lot of nice utilities to get us produce clean code.

551k views551k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Eclipse
Eclipse
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

-
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
2.7K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
2.3K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
392
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 131
    Does it all
  • 76
    Integrates with most of tools
  • 64
    Easy to use
  • 63
    Java IDE
  • 32
    Best Java IDE
Cons
  • 14
    2000 Design
  • 9
    Bad performance
  • 4
    Hard to use
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Java
Java
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Eclipse, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

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