Eclipse is extremely powerful, but newer IDEs may be passing it
July 16, 2019
Eclipse is extremely powerful, but newer IDEs may be passing it
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse
At our organization, the selection of the IDE to use is made by individual engineers or on a project-specific basis, depending on the needs of the project. We use it for software engineering, mostly of Java code. We also have developed a plug-in for the artificial intelligence language we use.
- It (mostly) smoothly integrates development with version control.
- Incremental, continuous compilation and instant error checking are huge wins.
- Built in unit testing.
- Support for a variety of different languages and file types, with the ability to develop plug-ins for new types.
- The version control integration is sometimes sketchy, especially for GIT.
- Integration with Maven and Gradle are not complete and do not always exploit Eclipse's continuous compilation strengths.
- Eclipse costs nothing, and it is enormously useful, so it has had very high ROI.
- Some of its deficiencies have led some engineers to try other IDEs recently. Usually to IntelliJ or VSCode
Visual Studio is just a huge, clunky nightmare. However, it has been recommended that VSCode might be better than Eclipse in some ways, so I will be trying that soon.