C++ or Java-- What do you use for an IDE / Why?

Question

I'm sort of on the fence about what I want to use as an IDE for the moment. At present I'm using netbeans, but the performance of the debugger on the c++ side seems a little lacking. Sometimes a program will have a misplaces ( and it will just say "program failed" after compilation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Then I have to debug and step through it line by line, which won't be possible when programs are thousands of lines long, hell, it's hard enough at 400 lines long or so.

What program do you use? What advantages does it have? What disadvantages does it have? Would you switch? What alternatives have you tried?

Best answer gets 10 pts. Good luck!

Answer 1

I use vi (a text editor), for C++ and a little bit of Java. There is nothing graphical about my working environment, build servers are located in different cities of several states, the resulting programs (other than some test modules) typically cannot even run on the build servers and have to be moved to different remote computers first.



advantages:

I can connect to a remote build server from anything that can handle a terminal emulator -- from a WYSE terminal in the server room or my phone on a commuter train, make changes, build, test, profile, and debug.



disadvantages:

not an *integrated* environment: the debugger is a standalone program, the runtime and memory profilers are standalone programs. Even source code indexing to help vi jump from function to function is done with a standalone program.



would I switch?

wouldn't switch to another text editor (despite the great things I hear about emacs). If I ever get a different job, where IDEs fit the purpose, then sure, I'll use an IDE. Visual Studio 2010 looks pretty good.

Answer 2

If you are using Windows I would stick with Visual C++ Express Edition. Registration is required but it is completely free.



On the Linux side, I just stick with Netbeans. It can lag a bit, but nothing like the other tools I've tried.

Answer 3

NetBeans does the excellent linking for C/c++ to offer the executable. and that i say that over Eclipse. The capability in Eclipse is there are such a lot of pre-configuratons for receive.

Answer 4

For C++, no IDE beats VC++ 2010.

For Java (urg), Eclipse is good.