When comparing Microsoft Visual Studio vs Ninja IDE, the Slant community recommends Microsoft Visual Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for C++ on UNIX-like systems?” Microsoft Visual Studio is ranked 18th while Ninja IDE is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Microsoft Visual Studio is:
The Community Edition of Visual Studios and the Unity add-on can be downloaded and used free of charge.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free Community Edition
The Community Edition of Visual Studios and the Unity add-on can be downloaded and used free of charge.
Pro IntelliSense
IntelliSense is the general term for a number of features: List Members, Parameter Info, Quick Info, and Complete Word. These features help you to learn more about the code you are using, keep track of the parameters you are typing, and add calls to properties and methods with only a few keystrokes.
Pro One of the few bearable C++ debuggers available
Pro There's a huge library of plugins
Visual Studio has a massive library of plugins to choose from.
Pro Extensions
Pro Modern language support
The recently released 15.7 branch provides competitive modern language support.
Pro Product backlog
In agile development teams, one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to team mates 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 GitHub integration
Makes production faster especially if git is used. One can see changed files at the go and commit (with push possibility) when ever one so desires.
Pro More modular installer
Visual Studio 2017 supports a much more modern and modular installer. You no longer have to install many gigabytes of stuff you don't need. Everything is broken down into much smaller pieces and it's much more apparent which pieces you need.
Pro Embedded 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 Friendly UI
Pro Comes with a Windows framework
Pro Syntax highlighting
Pro Extensible
Plugins can easily be created to add features that you may need but are otherwise missing from the IDE.
Pro Virtualenv support
Has out of the box support for virtualenv, which can be added when first starting a project or later through the settings.
Pro Embedded Python console
Has an embedded python console built in.
Pro Script runner
It is possible to run the project or any file opened in the editor with just one click.
Pro Find in files / find usages
Allows you to search one or more words, a regular expression, etc.
Pro Breakpoints
Pro Multi-platform
- GNU/Linux
- OS X
- Windows
Pro Built-in static analysis
NInja IDE highlights both static and PEP8 errors in a file. With each type of error having its own icon.
Pro Web-inspector
Pro Render HTML files
Also supports rendering HTML files currently loaded in the editor.
Pro Project management
Allows you to manage projects, saving descriptions and information about them and letting the user to perform file management related task inside the IDE itself.
Pro Easily locate code
Code locator allows quick and direct access to any file, function or class inside one of the project by simply pressing a few keys. Pressing Ctrl + K
open a popup over a text field, where you can type the name of what you want.
Pro Symbols explorer built in
You can easily see all functions, classes and attributes in the current program.
Pro Written in Python
Pro Bash support
Pro Sublime snippets
Pro Multi-language support
Cons
Con Sluggish
Horribly slow on low-end machines due to bulky size, they should modularize it instead of trying to do everything.
Con It's very large
The most basic Visual Studio installation will take up 5GB of disk space.
Con Non native window frame
IDE main window lacks standard window frame (titlebar/borders) - a custom solution is in use where 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).
Con Latest version (2.3) is from 2013
But it looks like the project is still maintained towards 3.0 release.
Con Bad performance
Freezes and slows down often.
