[TheAdamist]

Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects.

Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two.

Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

[josephg]

> Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades on our computers because the default company issued machines (which were quite good at the time) didn't have enough RAM to use eclipse properly.

I can't imagine why it went out of favour...

[someguyiguess]

This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...)

VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...)

But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...

[pjmlp]

Definitely, it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace, and there are old Reddit comments of me complaining about in on /r/java.

Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.

[ryukoposting]

> It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.

[Alupis]

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content.

Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.

[z3t4]

Todays hard drives are faster then memory was back then, so it's probably not an issue now. Could probably reparse your entire code base at every key stroke without you noticing.

[pjc50]

We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!

[com2kid]

I switched to VSCode because it has a free editor with a really great jump to file hotkey.

I remember when the big VS added jump to file but it was so damn miserably implemented as to be useless.

Having worked at Microsoft for a decade, the most frequent way I navigated a large source tree was dir /s *partialfilename*.*

Then again while I was there, most code bases couldn't even open in Visual Studio. (highly team dependent, I was mostly on older C/C++ code bases.)

Some teams at MS paid for an editor called Source Insight, which indexed your code and could also parse C #defines and other preprocessor macros, which was super unique and powerful. It had an incredibly powerful symbol and fuzzy filename search capabilities, I'd frequently have Source Insight open just so I could find where in a folder structure a file was and then I'd open it up in my preferred editor.

Back when I got my first SSD the largest boost to my dev productivity was not in compile times (large C++ code bases tend to template bound more so than IO bound), it was how fast I could find files in the directory structure.

I'm sure Vi/Emacs users have some magic set of plugins that do all of this for them, but as someone back on Windows back in the 2000s and 2010s, the supported MS tooling was horrible at all this.

Then VS Code comes along with amazing fuzzy file name matching. Holy cow. Sure it is missing 90% of the power of real Visual Studio (being able to have a debugger step from front end web code to your backend and then into stored procedures in SQL, running on a remote machine, that your debugger transparently auth'd to, is something Microsoft had working 20 years ago and would be considered impossible dark magic with today's tooling), but wow can I navigate a project quickly!

[danielodievich]

Site license to source insight was something I missed badly after Microsoft. Bought my own copy. It did wonders when looking at Snowflake monorepo, which was otherwise impossible to understand . Great piece of software, still going strong too.

[m-schuetz]

Same here! Easily jumping between files is one of the best features. I always have VS and vscode open simultaneously, doing about 99% of the work in vscode and only using VS to compile and to debug.

[dfajgljsldkjag]

Eclipse is not safer it just has fewer people looking for holes in it. The problem is not the software but how we trust code from the internet. Even if you used Eclipse a fake recruiter could still trick you into running a bad script. We cannot fix social engineering by changing the text editor.

[vbezhenar]

For me vscode is super-lightweight and at the same time has enough functionality. I didn't use Eclipse for many years, but from my memory it was super-heavyweight. And it didn't really support anything except Java.

Interestingly Java is the only language that I've found vscode support poor, so I keep buying Idea license exclusively for Java projects. For rest of languages that I use (JS/TS, Go, Python, Shell, YAML, XML) I'm using vscode and happy about it.

In recent years vscode starting to get bloated, mostly with AI stuff. But so far I can disable everything AI with a single setting and it works good afterwards. I'd prefer for all AI features to be contained in a separate plugin that I can just not install, but I guess managers these days want to shove AI in everyone's throat.

Another good thing about vscode is that its written with JavaScript and can be launched in browser, so in the future I want to put my development environment in the browser, but so far I didn't do that.

[reaperducer]

why is VS code the defacto answer nowaday?

  1. It's free
  2. A million plug-ins

Personally, I don't use it because it's so dog slow.

[josephg]

> A million plug-ins

> I don't use it because it's so dog slow.

You might find it runs better with fewer plugins.

[mhuffman]

I have noticed that Antigravity is lightening fast, wonder what magic they are using?

[eikenberry]

Seems very odd to me that someplace would force the use of a particular development tool. I've seen it only one time while interviewing, where they wanted everyone to have identical setups so they could easily hop onto each others computers when needed... it was weird and I took it as a red flag and didn't follow through them them.

[leptons]

Some software development workflows require specific tooling, with complex setups. While it may be possible to do with other tools, it's often very difficult, and not really worth the trouble when there is a known working setup. It's easier to onboard new people if they use the established toolchain with known working configs. I worked at a place once where it took several days to get the dev environment set up. It would have taken far longer if someone wanted to use whatever random tool they'd prefer to use.

[ecshafer]

If you code in embedded systems or FPGA its very common since you are using very specific vendor tools. A lot of enterprise companies have a "one way" kind of philosophy as well, they lock down the systems so much "for security" that you might not be able to install anything other than Eclipse or whatever is approved.

[pjmlp]

This is common in many companies, IT wants standard development environments.

[giantg2]

Licensing issues and security configuration management are major reasons to want uniformity.

[userbinator]

That is a massive red flag to me too. They are basically saying "you are identical to everyone else, and easily replaced."

[gucci-on-fleek]

I don't really like VS Code either, but I personally use it because I tend to jump between a half-dozen semi-obscure languages, and VS Code is the only [0] editor that supports all of them.

[0]: Vim and Emacs have almost as good or slightly better language support, but I prefer GUIs over TUIs.

[blackoil]

Because it is fast enough, easy to onboard to with sane defaults. MS provided initial plug-ins and the ecosystem developed.

Threat model described is not unique to VS Code

[elzbardico]

Eclipse was always a confusing product. It was a bastard child of Visual Age for Java from IBM, which was already a bastard of IBM's Visual Age for Smalltalk.

Visual Age for Java had some quirkiness being a Smalltalk IDE adapted to Java development (for example, the concept of a file and a hierarchical filesystem itself was definitely a second class citizen in Visual Age) and eclipse kind of rounded those rough edges.

But Eclipse became a victim of late 90s/early 2000s academic driven overengineering with overly complex/bureaucratic stuff like OSGI, and the support for the absurdly bureaucratic java development ecosystem at that time.

[atq2119]

My personal reason for switching some years ago was the excellent remote session support via ssh.

I haven't reevaluated that choice in a while, but that plus LSP support (and to a lesser extent ML Auto-complete) are must-haves for me nowadays.

[closeparen]

Never liked Eclipse, but I’ve been forced to use VSCode over my preferred JetBrains IDEs because it is the only modern mainstream editor with a competent client-server mode. As in, actually rendering the UI locally while doing all the code indexing and intelligence on the server. Corporate world would much rather maintain disposable remote VMs than help you unfuck your laptop after whatever required security upgrade installs the wrong version of a scripting language and sends everything to hell.

[sakjur]

Have you tried Jetbrains Gateway? I’m curious whether it’s insufficient or just too recent, as I’ve eyed it a few times.

[mrkeen]

Yikes, sounds like hell.

Corporate never seems to get that git is the kind of interface you want between your computer and their servers.

Then when you trash your computer you can just get it back to the state of being able to git.

[sfn42]

To myself and many others, vscode is not the defacto answer. JetBrains is. IntelliJ was miles ahead of eclipse last time I checked. Rider is miles ahead of Visual Studio. WebStorm is miles ahead of vscode for js etc.

It's not even a competition, to me. I've had to use Visual Studio instead of Rider for work the past year and it's been a very bad experience.

The biggest difference is JetBrains intellisense feels like it's reading my mind, I'll just type a couple characters and hit tab most of the time. Visual studio on the other hand has the worst intellisense I can imagine. It very frequently just messes up what I'm doing - I'll write what I want correctly, hit space and VS will just change it to something entirely different and import a package while it's at it. It's incredibly annoying. And when I actually want to use auto complete, say for example I've declared a variable on the line above and I want to use it, I'll write a couple characters and then without fail the variable I just declared on the line above is like option 6 down the list behind a bunch of crap that doesn't even make sense in the context at all. And as if it wasn't enough that the IDE is crap when it's working correctly, it very frequently craps out and just stops providing syntax highlighting and such in .razor files, or showing errors in files that compile just fine, forcing me to restart it and delete the .vs folder. Like every day.

Personally I think the only people who prefer other products than JB are people who don't know what they're missing. JB is literally just better in pretty much every way. At least the products I've used. I think I'll turn down the next job that asks me to use VS.

[forrestthewoods]

I’ve never written a line of Java in my life. Why would I ever use Eclipse?

VSCode is defacto standard because it’s kinda mediocre but works ok enough for every language and every platform. Microsoft created and popularized LSP so VSCode isn’t a single language IDE.

I use a mixture of code editors. My favorite is probably 10x but it only works with C++. So VSCode is just a reasonably standard unless a different editor is better for a specific use case.

[Avicebron]

The only thing that matters is extensibility/customization and speed. I want the lightest, most customizable thing that isn't emacs (for real reasons, trying to set up emacs at work is too much of pain in the ass) as my single pane of glass on any OS I care to use. If it can't do that, it doesn't live long.

[rapind]

I want the lightest, most customizable thing, that is also Vim. Thank god there's Vim for that. (cloning my dotfiles for instant setup on a new box)

[bitwize]

Thing that IntelliJ and even NetBeans have going for them is that they seem like tools for getting work done. Eclipse puts more emphasis on being a platform which means you have to download and configure plugins just to get started. Great if you're a corporate shop with a standard setup that's force-pushed to every machine. Not so much if you're just getting started or working on side projects or in a startup, which is how languages and frameworks gain mindshare in the web era.

Visual Studio Code—I dunno. It's an editor more than an IDE. It lets Webdev Andys create an empty directory, put an index.ts in there, and get started right away. Yes, WebStorm does the same, but VS Code comes with decent multilanguage support for free. It's like vim or Emacs but crappier and more bloated, but a lot of people don't care about that.

[m-schuetz]

I've also used Eclipse in the past but almost exclusively used vscode in recent years. It's just a phenomenal text editor. It's got fantastic multi-line selection and editing tools and searching for files is instant and you don't even need to be fully accurate with the filename. Nowadays I hardly ever use the sidebar to look for the file, I just type thr ctrl+e shortcut and insert several letters of the file and I instantly get the result. It's a small thing with a huge impact. VS, for comparison, lags a few seconds when searching files, and it misses files that are not imported into the workspace. That difference makes VS useless to me.

[simoncion]

I loved Eclipse. I still like it quite a lot.

I stopped using it because none of the plugins for the languages I was using at the time (Ruby, Python, Erlang) were either worth a damn, or getting updated to track new language features.

I started using VSCode because IntelliJ-family IDEs will report incomplete search results as complete when they are rebuilding their search indices. To put it another way, they will tell you that a string that definitely appears in the project does not appear, if they haven't gotten around to re-adding the files that contain that string to the search index.

This to me is intolerable behavior. Others find it perfectly acceptable.

[MaulingMonkey]

I bucket Eclipse under "heavyweight IDE". I used to use it, plus the CDT plugin, for my C++ nonsense.

Then Visual Studio's Express and later Community SKUs made Visual Studio free for ≈home/hobby use in the same bucket. And they're better at that bucket for my needs. Less mucking with makefiles, the mixed ability to debug mixed C# and C++ callstacks, the fact that it's the same base as my work tools (game consoles have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, GPU vendors have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, the cool 3rd party intellisense game studios like integrates with Visual Studio...)

Eclipse, at least for me, quickly became relegated to increasingly rare moments of Linux development.

But I don't always want a heavyweight IDE and it's plugins and load times and project files. For a long time I just used notepad for quick edits to text files. But that's not great if you're, say, editing a many-file script repository. You still don't want all the dead weight of a heavy weight IDE, but there's a plethora of text editors that give you tabs, and maybe some basic syntax highlighting, and that's all you were going to get anyways. Notepad++, Sublime Text, Kate, ...and Visual Studio Code.

Well, VSC grew some tricks - an extension API for debuggers, spearheading the language server protocol... heck, I eventually even stopped hating the integrated VCS tab! It grew a "lightweight IDE" bucket, and it serves that niche for me well, and that's a useful niche for me.

In doing so, it's admittedly grown away from the "simple text editor" bucket. If you're routinely doing the careful work of auditing possibly malicious repositories before touching a single build task, VSC feels like the wrong tool to me, despite measures such as introducing the concept of untrusted repositories. I've somewhat attempted to shove a round peg into a square hole by using VSC's profiles feature - I now have a "Default" profile for my coding adventures and a "Notes" profile with all the extensions gone for editing my large piles of markdown, and for inspecting code I trust enough to allow on disk, but not enough to autorun anything... but switching editors entirely might be a better use of my time for this niche.

[doodlesdev]

  > everything seems worse than eclipse

I would say the answer is that's not the general perception of the software. I'm personally migrating out of VSCode, because having to use the OpenVSX registry to have open-source builds makes me mad (I've since migrated to Zed for now, since I've never adapted well to neovim nor emacs).

In general, I believe most people see VSCode as "good enough". Maybe not the best text editor, but it's good enough at everything it does and extensible enough to the point that there's really no point to go for anything else unless you have a really good reason to.

   > Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

My previous answer is thinking about editors in general. But in the case of Eclipse I'd say you're right LOL.

[jen20]

“Java” does not explain why Eclipse is irrelevant where IntelliJ is thriving.

[com2kid]

People forget that there was a period of time during which the Java runtime installer tried to install actual adware. You had to jump through hoops to deselect adware from being forced onto your machine, it was infuriating.

Setting up a new machine, I could choose between Eclipse (free, took forever to open, slow, asked me a million questions before it let me start working) or Visual Studio (cost money, incredibly powerful, written in C++ and was really damn fast.)

[mr_toad]

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Some people just want a text editor, whereas eclipse is “an IDE and Platform”.

[IshKebab]

I don't think that's really why VSCode succeeded or Eclipse failed.

Eclipse failed because it was slow and janky and had abysmal UX and it only supported Java well.

VSCode succeeded because it has a much more sane UX, it's way less janky, it's highly extensible and language neutral.

[gt0]

It's free, it has support for loads of languages, and it's kind of fashionable.

Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.

I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.

For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.

[dangus]

It's the license. The MIT license is what makes VSCode the defacto answer.

It also runs on the web, which makes it extremely convenient to toss into...web things. It's the code editor for the Google Cloud console, the Lambda web console, the GitHub web editor, and so on.

I'm going to guess that Eclipse doesn't have the same amount of security issues because it's not a popular target. Everyone (relatively speaking) is using VSCode or something based on it.

[jonwinstanley]

As I remember it, VS code was Microsoft’s response to Sublime.

Sublime was exceptionally popular for web developers throughout the 2010s.

Sublime was maintained by a single person as far as I know.

VS code was pretty much a copy of Sublime but with a much better extensions system and relatively quickly there were some great plugins that made VS code the de-facto editor for web development.

[glenngillen]

Wasn’t it a copy of Atom?

[pjmlp]

Nope it started as a Web IDE, going against Atom was their pivot to win market share, there are a few talks from the team if you search for VSCode history.

[jhasse]

Let's also not forget one big reason VSCode took over and Sublime lost: VSCode is gratis and (mostly) open-source, while Sublime is proprietary.

[mrkeen]

It just happens. I was happy on netbeans, then I was forced over to eclipse, which I got used to. Then I got forced over to intellij. I'm still pissed about that (even though it's rider for me these days).

I don't mind VSCodium that much because I can put my tooling on the side (like a good unix fanboy) instead of hoping that jetbrains reimplements every other tool. Ag, grep beat IDE searches any day.

But yeah we have reach a stupid point in the industry where VSCodium asks me to trust a codebase before it will let me edit it.

[DrBazza]

> Why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

For what I do, there's no reasonable alternative at the moment.

I'm sure someone will correct me, but it's the only editor that correctly (for some definition of correct) allows remote editing and devcontainers:

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box]

[desktop OS] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh (jumphost) -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

I won't name and shame other editors (or IDEs), but either they simply can't do that, or their performance is absolutely, shockingly, abysmal.

[boomlinde]

I would rather solve file access at an entirely different level. A filesystem is a reasonable, editor-agnostic abstraction for this, and I can use sshfs to mount a remote directory over SSH in a way that's invisible to whatever tools I prefer to use to edit the files.

If you have a jumphost chain, you can configure that in the SSH config.

I don't know what a devcontainer is exactly, but if it's a container in the sense that it runs a Linux development system, I would investigate whether that, too, could easily be set up for access via SSH or mounted locally through some other mechanism.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Wild. I would quit my job and start selling jam at the Farmer’s Market before I went back to Eclipse! :)

[zombot]

If you did webshit in eclipse, especially with NPM involved, it would be just as bad. Running arbitrary code from a downloaded bundle seems normal in that world.

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

I don't get the connection, but Java had log4j, i.e. a remote code execution vulnerability.

[tannhaeuser]

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Dude, Eclipse has been out of favor for well over ten years now due to Jetbrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA).

[bilekas]

This is so insane to me. Eclipse is... Fine for Java in the sense Visual Studio is for dotnet. But man can they both be slow.

Use case depending sometimes you just need a quick editor, thats why sublime had and probably still has a huge userbase, its fast startup and flexibility. Vim, emacs and derivatives of it are the same story.

I can't imagine ever opening up eclipse to edit a zig/go/js file or project. It's too bloated.

The answer is neovim anyway. That's all anyone needs. /s

[trelane]

Emacs is a full IDE, not just a quick one-off editor. Its power comes from having everything scriptable from the ground up. Contrast this with the modern Extension concept, where there is a hard line between the editor's code and any changes you might want to make to its behavior.

I think vim is probably similar, but I've not gotten into it that much.

[pjmlp]

VSCode main architect is one of the Eclipse authors, Erich Gamma.

Other than that, it is more fashionable to ship Chrome with applications and JavaScript is hot. /s

Eclipse remains my main Java IDE at work.