When comparing Eclipse CDT vs Microsoft's Visual Studio, the Slant community recommends Eclipse CDT for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for C on Windows?” Eclipse CDT is ranked 5th while Microsoft's Visual Studio is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse CDT is:
View values of variables on mouse hover during debugging.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice Mouse Hover assist during debugging
View values of variables on mouse hover during debugging.
Pro Free and open source
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
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 Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Macro definition browser
Pro Javascript Intellisense support
Javascript Intellisense allows Visual Studio to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
Pro Clean UI
Visual Studio has a clean, intuitive user interface.
Pro Cloud storage
Your Visual Studio online account gives you a place to store your code, backlog, and other project data with no servers to deploy, configure, or manage.
Pro Product backlog
In agile development teams, one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to teammates and track their progress on them. VS provides a web-based interface for you to track your team's complete progress on the project.
Pro Very good XML/XSD support
Syntax highlighting, Intellisense, and jump to declaration all work in XML documents.
Cons
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 UI can be confusing
There's an overly abundant presence of menus, this forces you to constantly click around the different menu structures.
Con Tons of feature bloat
If you're doing simple web frontend dev, then VS is far too arcane and feature bloated for most of your work.
Con Not cross-platform
Visual Studio is only available on Windows, which causes platform lock-in.
Con Slow
Visual Studio can be quite laggy.
Con Takes up a lot of space
Visual Studio can use about 6 GBs which a lot of space to be taken from your computer.
Con Terribly slow development
Keep dreaming about features already provided by alternative products.
Con Non-native window frame
The IDE main window lacks a standard window frame (titlebar/borders). A custom solution is used where the custom titlebar contains numerous application-specific controls. This results in inconsistent UX and can also be problematic when you're using shell replacements or other various window-management software (such as bbLean).