Eclipse from 2005 was already great, and better than most languages support out there.
As was Netbeans in 2005, or Delphi, VB, Visual Studio,....
JetBrains gets too much praise.
As was Netbeans in 2005, or Delphi, VB, Visual Studio,....
JetBrains gets too much praise.
Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment.
VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.
Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.
Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.
And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly.
But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.
Anyway, I sure see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others. Comparing a modern IDE to its old version in the context of software bloat is the whole point I'm trying to make.
I think bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than its old versions and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.
Visual Assist being a well known one.
It isn't as if JetBrains products aren't full of plugins as well.
I see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others.
A better idea woud've been comparing a modern version of VS with VS 6, for example.
Anyway, my point is bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than the old and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.
This is a bit similar to the concept of accidental vs inherent complexity in sw engineering. There's accidental bloat and inherent "bloat", so to speak:)
My impression is people don't usually acknowledge the existence of inherent "bloat" in discussions like this one.
VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.
Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.
Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.
But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.
Writing C++ in Eclipse CDT or KDevelop was simply a pain.
Actually, a plain editor with syntax highlight was probably a better option because it was not even pretending to have "smart" features that would inevitably break on each non-trivial piece of code -- better no promises than false promises.
Delphi, and C++ Builder for that matter, were great as a package: fast GUI builder, editor, debugger, etc. That said, I don't remember them offering much in terms of working with code: finding an identifier usages, refactoring, etc.
As to praising JB, it wasn't my intent to single them out, surely there're other great IDEs. Their products is just something I'm personally familiar with. If something better happens to cross my way, I'll have no problems switching.
It was still mainstream in 2005, I think. Do you remember if I get that right? At least we were using it at work in 2005.
VS release cadence is much faster nowadays, isn't it? :)
The in my opinion much more important reason was that Visual Studio 6 was the last version of Visual Studio that was capable of running under Windows 9x (every version of Visual Studio that was released after required some Windows-NT-based Windows version; Visual Studio .NET 2002 was the last version to run under Windows NT 4.0: Visual Studio .NET 2003 required at least Windows 2000; keep in mind that Windows XP only came out end of October 2001).