On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 8:30 PM Kenneth Fogel <[email protected]> wrote:
> At Code One this year I will be presenting with Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott > Selikoff a session titled Java IDE Wars. I am working on my list of talking > points for NB. Please suggest any part of NetBeans that makes it superior > to Eclipse, IntelliJ or Visual Studio Code. Are there features that users > assume does not exist in NetBeans but does?. Last week I got NB 11.1 > working on the new Raspberry Pi 4 w/ 4 Gig RAM. Next will be to determine > that remote debugging still works from NB on a Win PC to a Pi. > > One significant feature is the quarterly updates. I may not be too happy > with Java's 6 month cycle but for an IDE to be successful it does need to > be more responsive to its community thru frequent and regular updates. > > Please let me know what you think I should discuss should you have the > time. > > Thanks, > > Ken Fogel > > > Visual Studio Code uses Electron.js so it's a webapp running in a private copy of Google Chrome, so it needs lots of memory, doesn't work on *BSDs, long and difficult to compile, and (probably since Microsoft hates Java and largely invented .NET to destroy it after losing the Sun/Microsoft lawsuit) Java is not well supported in Visual Studio Code and what is there is mostly from extensions made by Red Hat (which use M2Eclipse for Maven support, and we know how poorly that works in Eclipse itself). It also does usage reporting by default. For Javascript/Typescript it does a good job, but other languages vary. I've tried to use it for Go development, and it seemed pretty half-baked, CGo (import "C") made it come apart at the seams and it started deleting other imports, C++ support is a "preview" at this stage. Also doesn't success of VS Code decrease sales of VS? One day they will either pull the plug on one or the other (just like they are killing off the .NET framework, and making .NET Core into .NET 5), or close the source and sell it alongside VS. Eclipse takes very long to start up, has poor Maven support with M2Eclipse (you have to keep doing "Update project" if you change pom.xml), it seems extremely difficult to build the whole IDE from source, the license is more restrictive, importing Ant projects broke pretty badly and dependencies located outside their project directory get dropped. At one stage it had tons of contributors and plugins, nowdays it seems to have shrunk, Google pulled out, it's no longer the reference Android development IDE. It uses OSGi, but uses it so badly that installing plugins often requires a complete restart. The website is badly organized and it's difficult to find good documentation. It doesn't support Go, there used to be a third-party plugin but the developer gave up on Eclipse development and it's now abandoned. Damjan
