To use an IDE or not to use an IDE

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I'm starting to work on C++. The Technology Director(My unofficial programming teacher) of my school recommends that I start to use an IDE, once I get started. I did not like using Eclipse(FOSS IDE) when he had me switch to that for python. The #1 reason I did not like the IDE was because it was sluggish. Do you know of any quicker IDE's for older computers? What is your opinion on IDE's? Do you think they are worthwhile? If so, what value do they have?

There are many IDEs to choose from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... .2FC.2B.2B

Programming stuff in Notepad and running it with the cmd can be a very tedious affair if you program a lot. Therefore, there's no reason to give up on IDEs alltogether.

i like working in pycharm, that costs money though, its auto completion is top notch and it will pick up on internal variables when sugesting.

it also has plugins for a lot of languages, that said i dont know how ligthwheight ti is.

For small programs, any text editor will do...

But for larger projects, an IDE is great to have, not just because of the editing features, but also because they have advanced testing software built in, and automatically generate much of the metadata that is needed for documentation.
They also provide an easy way to manage files in a given project

For C and C++ there is of course Microsoft's Visual Studio programming suite, which does run fairly well on older hardware as well (loading and compilation ofc takes a while longer...) and includes a large set of libraries from the start.
Alternatively, a good, small IDE i've come across is Code::Blocks. It runs great on limited hardware, but you do need to make or find most of the libraries you need.

Codeblocks is really fast, so I think I'll try it and see how I like it.

I've heard good things about CodeBlocks, I usually use Visual Studio 2008 (not 2010, somehow they managed to make something as relatively simple as an IDE GUI run slow on a modern PC which is ridiculous). I even use VS to edit code I build in Linux or Mac OS.

I haven't used Eclipse, and what you're saying scares me. VS 2010 is about as slow as I could ever imagine an IDE being. It sounds like Eclipse may have beat it though. VS 2008 has been fine.

From http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums ... 3ea5c1d89/

"Kumaresh,

VS2010 Ultimate was very thouroughly performance tested. We invested very heavilly in performance testing - particularly in the beta and release candidate time frames, and you can read about some of those efforts on Brian Harry's and Jason Zander's blogs. Of course, there's still room for improvement.

What's interesting is that many VS2010 users rate performance as Excellent, with over an overwhelming majority rating it as Okay or better. However, there is a small number of people who are finding performance to be unacceptable. So we're trying to understand what those customers are seeing that we didn't see in our testing, and what we can do to fix it.

I appreciate your willingness to help. Please contact me at DevPerf@Microsoft.com with more information about the issues you're seeing and we can work with you on getting a profile.

Regards,

David Berg

David Berg - MSFT"

What the hell kind of performance testing did they do? Just open the thing on any machine, it's clearly dog slow. You don't need to "investigate".

I find IDE's to be unnecessary! Why download Codeblocks when all you have to do is open a text editor like Gedit write your program, save it, and open a terminal and compile. gcc and g++ both have compiler/debug warnings and you can turn them al the way up with -Wall compiling is as easy as
gcc -Wall prog.c -o prog

or

g++ -Wall prog.cpp -o prog

gcc/g++ will tell you if there is an error or warning and what line its on. Gedit colors variables, constants, function names, all different colors too. So its easy to look at. You can display the number of lines on the left hand side. As well as highlight the matching brackets. that helps with heavily nested programs.

To me, that is so much simpler and faster than using an IDE. Its a waste of hard drive space, resources and time. If you were adamant on using an IDE then Codeblocks IMO is the way to go!