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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't feature bloat (lots of people need feature X, some others need feature Y). The problem is that you can't properly uncheck/select features you don't want yet in the instealler, so you end up with a lot of stuff you don't need.

For performance: If you ask me what is more expensive computationally: Crysis or an IDE; I say an IDE can at least as performance hungry. Nothing strange with that. Try writing code to perform syntax check and autocompletion on broken/incomplete syntax, for a few thousand files, then you'll see what I mean.

I'm very happy to use a monster gaming machine for coding (professionally) if it increases my productivity even just a little.

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>I'm very happy to use a monster gaming machine for coding (professionally) if it increases my productivity even just a little.

I don't feel that is an appropriate reaction. Just because software is poorly optimized does not mean we should subject ourselves it.

For instance, eclipse does similar (in my opinion better) auto-completion than Visual Studios and it does not take the same resources, by a long shot.

> just because software is poorly optimized does not mean we should subject ourselves it.

Sure, I'd use an IDE that does what I need but does it faster than VS, in a heartbeat. Obviously. Also, a lot is happening and very few are working professionally in several environments, so compare what they do every day, with what they do occasionally or maybe a long time ago. When I say I think Eclipse is a dog, that probably because the last Eclipse I used was Ganymede (2008) on java 1.5, hitting "run" and getting coffee before my jboss monster had started. I suppose a lot has happened there too.

Most IDE's have much better navigation and autocomplete than VS does out of the box. When I say "VS" I really mean "VS+Resharper" as VS more or less useless without ReSharper. With ReSharper however, it's definitely one of the best IDE's there is, and almost surely the best one for C#, at least until this comes out.

I couldn't disagree more, VisualStudio is a glorified text editor - there is absolutely no reason for its monumental system requirements. Microsoft have completely forgotten about the core functionality of the product - programmers writing code. Instead they've bloated the thing down with many, many 'features' which only detract from that core functionality.

If you look at something like Atom with the Omnisharp plugin, it achieves everything I need from VisualStudio with a tiny fraction of the resources. Then again, if you're one of these programmers who write more code by dragging & dropping around a UI than actually typing (Microsoft has created a whole generation of these coders), then you probably need a lot of the VisualStudio bloat.

I could not have said it better myself.

As said elsewhere in this thread, every feature you describe as "bloat" doesn't actually run until you tell it to. The features that make Visual Studio feel slow are things like IntelliSense, which is pretty goddamn core to the actual writing of code, not the fact that there's a visual designer for a few things. And code analysis is--wait for it--a pretty hard problem that perturbs a lot of electrons to do correctly, regardless of language or what particular program is kicking it off.

"But bloat!" is never an argument. Point to what it actually does to harm your experience if you want to formulate an argument; "it exists" is a nonsensical kvetch.

> The problem is that you can't properly uncheck/select features you don't want yet in the instealler, so you end up with a lot of stuff you don't need.

Isn't that functionally the same as being bloated?

It is in a way yes. However a of the bloat I feel is mainly hard drive bloat in the sense that not only do I not use it, It's never even loaded or visible in the application.

So it's different from "feature bloat" in the regular sense, that is just tons of buttons for things you don't use.

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