Thread: Comparing IDEs

Code::Blocks is virtually guaranteed to have a smaller memory/resource footprint than VC++ Express, due to the fact that it's not a Microsoft product :P

Eclipse has great C++ support, but it's a little slow, because it runs on Java. Qt Creator is fast and relatively lightweight, but it's geared toward Qt development, although it still works great as a general-purpose C++ IDE.

Visual Studio generally has a ton more stuff it supports, such as profilers, profile-guided optimizations, other languages, support for XML, Javascript, Typescript, testing, intellisense and a ton more stuff. But as far as IDE goes... usually, it's just preference. Visual Studio has its own compiler which gets frequent updates a few months or so, and using them with other IDEs is a little difficult. So again, any is fine as long you like it and it has all the features you need and want.

There is also CodeLite an IDE influenced by Code::Blocks.
CodeLite • A free, Open Source, Cross Platform C/C++ IDE

It started off as a lite version of an IDE very similar to Code::Blocks.
But, it kept added features so to call it a lite version of Code::Blocks is no longer correct.

The main difference from my point of view (being a Code::Blocks user) is CodeLite is a non-plug-able IDE while Code::Blocks is plug-able IDE.
Where plug-able IDE means you can turn off/on features during run-time.

I have only used CodeLite a few times; mainly just to see if any features are worth porting to Code::Blocks.
I decided some features are nice; like wx-config usage (under Windows OS). So, I am working on porting wx-config usage to Code::Blocks Wizards.

Tim S.

Originally Posted by stahta01

There is also CodeLite an IDE influenced by Code::Blocks.

I used codelite every day for more than two years, and while it seemed like a good IDE at first, over time, certain things about it became more and more frustrating. The biggest one was a complete lack of C++11 feature support. It may be different now, more than a year after I gave it up, but at the time, there was simply no interest in adding C++11 support. I also grew tired of the fact that it's built with wxWidgets. There was a time when I thought wxWidgets was great, but they just seem to be so far behind Qt now, and in my experience, they have a tendency to break compatibility with older versions - a big problem if you want to use new features in a large project written for a slightly older version. In my case, there would have been over a million lines of code to go through and update, just to get it to compile, let alone work properly.