[ngd]

One thing I miss from Eclipse, for Java development, is the ability to run unit tests (or a whole program for that matter) while compilation errors exist in the code. Intellij forces me to make all my code compile before I can try out anything - I believe I do less iterative development and make less exploratory changes to code when using Intellij because of this. I've found I can live with it, and do, because my team uses Intellij, but I sure do miss executing code that won't compile.

If you have never seen this feature of Eclipse, I encourage you to try it.

[sigzero]

Suggest a feature enhancement with the Jetbrains folks for it.

[quicksilver03]

They have already implemented it in IDEA 12, if I'm reading their website correctly.

Which personally I think was a waste of development time, I cannot imagine how it could be useful to keep compilation errors in your code.

[ngd]

I tried it out, you can now make an Eclipse like experience, albeit requiring many key presses to invoke compiliation and execution of code. It's not as slick as Eclipse, but its possible.

As for the merit of the technique - try it out. I've found it allows a level of experimentation not possible without the option; personally I've found that useful when it is not obvious what the right thing to do is upfront, I can try out a small change to a chunk of code, try it out via unit tests, then update all call sites appropriately; as opposed to attempting to "upgrade" call sites appropriately using a canned refactoring before I've validated whether or not I'm going to be able to achieve what I want for a few test cases.