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Add to SafariWhen comparing Eclipse vs JetBrains Rider, the Slant community recommends JetBrains Rider for most people. In the question“What are the best third-party IDEs for Unity?” JetBrains Rider is ranked 1st while Eclipse is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose JetBrains Rider is:
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
Pro Multiple languages - one IDE
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Fast compiler
Eclipse uses a custom compiler (which can also be used outside of Eclipse), which is often faster than the normal Java Compiler, especially for incremental compilation.
Pro Easy to use and get started with
It's interface is super easy to use, after adding required package for your task everything just works.
Pro Gives good perspectives on your project
The concept of perspectives is outstanding. It puts right tools at your fingertips, keeping the tools you currently don't need out from the workbench. For example, in VCS perspective it's all about versions and branches. In debug perspective it's all about state.
In java ee project it can show http endpoints in a very accessible manner.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Great debugger
Shows threads, concurrency locks, and conditional breakpoints.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro Good refactoring tools
Pro Faster than any other Java IDE
Fast, suitable for big projects, customizable, supports UML, many programming languages, plugins, and widgets vs NetBeans and JDeveloper. Support for Workspaces and Perspectives. Long term tested, free of charge, vs IntelliJ IDEA.
Pro Great in-UI documentation
Pro Dark theme improved!
Pro New C# IDE based on ReSharper and the IntelliJ platform
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Pro Superior "quality of life" features
Extremely good at filling in all the mindless boilerplate type code while you stay productive.
Pro Fast performant
Rider has everything you want from a serious IDE, but without the bloat. This results in significantly fast performance in day to day operations.
Pro Multiple runtime support
Project Rider supports the .NET Framework and Mono, with CoreCLR support in the works. It also includes templates for creating new projects, and when you create an empty project, it's literally empty
Pro Cross-platform
As well as running and debugging multiple runtimes, Project Rider itself runs on multiple platforms. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Pro Decompile code for any .net library
Pro Version control integration
Intellij plugins for Git, Mercurial, and TFS plus Local History of files.
Pro Supports all the development lifecycle
Project Rider can build MSBuild and XBuild solutions as well as DNX/.NET CLI projects, and allows debugging .NET and Mono applications. DNX/.NET CLI debugging and CoreCLR support are coming.
Pro Excellent UI, Features beyond Visual Studio (File Layout just one example)
Pro Free for Students
With a university email, Rider can be obtained for free.
Cons
Con Branding & online website is super cluttered
There are lots of official home pages for this IDE, the packages, and the repos - hard to find correct one. Also, the main name in IDE: "Eclipse", is same as "Eclipse Foundation" which makes things more confusing.
Con UI can be confusing
There's an overly abundant presence of menus, this forces you to constantly click around the different menu structures; foreign ideas, like Views and Perspectives; strange menu choices, like configure settings located in Windows menu->Preferences.
Con Lack of plugins with good user interfaces
Many Eclipse plugins are extremely confusing, with UIs that are even less consistent than Eclipse itself.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Tends to be slow and lags a lot
Con Poor language support via plugins
Eclipse supports other languages with a huge amount of plugins. Many languages have their own distribution, but multi-language is hard to exist in one project. Like Scala, there is no official support from Eclipse for this language. If Eclipse gets an update, languages such as these will not.
Con Newer versions are getting less stable
Eclipse 4 Neon randomly hangs. For example, during installing new software.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=513218
Con Some old bugs don't get fixed
E.g. change a parameter name to the same as a field - the field will not be prefixed with "this." like in IDEA.
Con Not free
Project Rider has a trial version available, but is not free.
Con No support for dotTrace, dotMemory yet on macOS
Support is promised on macOS, but currently only available on Windows. This means it’s not ideally suited for performance tracing and debugging.
Con Is RAM hungry
This product can hang a huge amount of RAM memory, up to 4 GB.
Con Relatively young project
Some bugs are to be expected since it's still a relatively young project.
Con Abnormal key maps
Though Visual Studio Key Map can be installed, it is still hard to find where the plugins are installed when one uses it to open a solution for the first time.
