[bignaj]

LLVM/Clang and Visual Studio are not analogous... LLVM/Clang is a compliler/compiler frontend while Visual Studio is an IDE. You're looking for Visual Studio vs. Eclipse or .NET vs. Mono etc. in each case I think most see the no-cost alternative as quite obviously inferior. This weakens your argument a bit.

[kyllo]

You're looking for Visual Studio vs. Eclipse

Or XCode, that's Apple's (free) IDE for Mac OS X

[dschiptsov]

Do you realize how much more complex is the optimizing compiler part compared to the IDE part? My bet is that there are two separate sub-divisions working on them.

OK, let's consider only compilers, if you wish..)

Btw, GNU Emacs, which is another "miracle" of software engineering, is a good-enough IDE part for Clang. Together, in pair, they are, in my opinion, even more flexible and less resourse-wasting than VS. And (surprise!) cross-platform.

[bignaj]

It sounds like you have a very firm background in the Unix/Linux world but you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to Windows-based development. For reference: I'm primarily a Unix/Linux developer but I work for Microsoft so I know what VS is about too. I understand what you're trying to say but it weakens your argument when you clearly haven't evaluated both sides. It sounds like you don't know how GNU Emacs was developed either -- the GNU version of Emacs was developed not by Scrum or Agile or "Waterfall" but by Richard Stallman's neckbeard in the MIT AI Lab...

[dschiptsov]

There was a link to Stallman's emacs paper back from 80s. Have you read it?)

The "miracle" of Emacs in that it has a very powerful DSL which uses proper abstractions - buffers, paragraphs, blocks, strings, fonts, characters etc. embedded into a Lisp. Thus it is a thoroughly programmable (not just extensible) editor.

It is quite beneficial to get familiar with ideas and design decisions behind Emacs, especially in the age of Java and copy-paste based coding.

[greggman]

I would really like to understand your experience. I'm not an emacs guru by any measure. I currently only use it when I have to, not when I want to. I'm also not a VS fan for editing. But...With Visual Assist installed (and possibly even without it), I don't see how emacs compares. But then maybe I just don't know how to setup emacs. I'd love to know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hOztCPEi-0

[to3m]

I'd love to know too! I use Emacs for everything except C++, because I've never found anything that works as well for code navigation and completion as visual assist. (Setup time is a factor, I admit. I'm not saying visual assist isn't a bit ropey in places.)

(As a text editor Visual Studio isn't great but it's perfectly adequate and I generally get by by copying and pasting to and from Emacs if I need to do anything complicated.)

[dschiptsov]

Not sure if my answer would be better that those of Google search.

I could have a flexible, programmable good-enough DE for C/C++ with make, emacs+cedet+cc-mode on my netbook with a crappy AMD x86-64 CPU and 1.5Gb of available RAM. It works fine for navigating over my own code, when I know what I am doing and why.

I would not explain the wonders of emacs+slime+cmucl or emacs+cider+clojure-mode here. Just one hint: everything works on a [remote] text terminal via ssh,tmux,etc. Google does it better.

Eclipse, while it could start without any progect in a minute or so, is unusable for anything but menu navigation.

Moreover, there are people around who still believe that make and command line tools are still good enough.

My bet is that very complex software, like nginx or postgresql has been written in vi or emacs.

[reitanqild]

> You're looking for Visual Studio vs. Eclipse or .NET vs. Mono etc. in each case I think most see the no-cost alternative as quite obviously inferior.

In manys eyes it is quite the opposite: Netbeans and Eclipse used to run circles around VS. I understand a lot of people like VS and there have been improvements lately bur please don't spread FUD on HN. Thanks.

[moron4hire]

I don't think it's fair to call the parent post "FUD", both because I think you've misused the term "FUD" and because I don't think the parent post is qualitatively wrong.

Having been a user of all of them for... as long as they have existed (oh God)... Visual Studio has been my preferred software at the time that each version existed. Even the much-maligned Visual Studio .NET 2002 seemed relatively faster and less error-prone than the then-current release of Eclipse. The decision to use Eclipse was usually a cost or programming language issue. You don't code Java in Visual Studio. There were many times, if I could have, I would have plunked down the cash.

Today, I try to setup my projects to be editor-agnostic, but I still end up using VS Express 2013 for Web when I'm working from a Windows machine. When I'm not, I'm not using Eclipse, I'm using something much lighter, like Vi or Geany.

[HNJohnC]

I've used all those products for decades, visual studio since version 6 in 1998. I have never seen anything that would back up your statement at any point in history and I don't know anyone with the relevant experience that would agree with you.

The world is made a better place when people post from a wealth of real world personal experience and cheapened by those that who do not. Please refrain.