Eclipse is extremely powerful, but newer IDEs may be passing it
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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.

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