Hello,
As per request in CDT discussion:
I've had some feedback from students who used Eclipse CDT this semester.
Here is a compiled summary based on around 10 replies that I got back from survey. (Class of 150 students).
Context:
- A 2nd year university (University of Toronto, Canada) course on System programming in C.
- Eclipse CDT was used as their main IDE this semester (for the first time).
- Eclipse was used for 3 C based assignments.
- I had University IT staff pre-install the Eclipse CDT spin on university computers. (Ubuntu 14.04)
- Some students had familiarity with Eclipse JDT.
Please note: Student's often complain that applications are too complicated because they have very limited time to learn a tool.
This doesn't necessarily reflect the difficulty of learning Eclipse in the industry.
Usage:
- 7/10 used Eclipse.
- One used CLion. The reason was that he learned to use Intellij a year ago and didn't feel like migrating to Eclipse because he didn't knew it very well.
- Two used only a text editor (Atom).
- Those who used Eclipse CDT would occasionally use text editors (eg Atom) for simple little hacks like editing makefiles.
- It was rare for students to do all their work in Eclipse (although possible). Many resorted to terminal for SVN, compiling or other external tools as it was too complex for them to figure out how to do it in Eclipse. (Although info provided in the slides).
Problems/Complaints:
- Dark theme was not functioning
that well (for older Eclipse Neon release). (This is not CDT specific, but CDT
users liked to use Dark theme).
- Debug perspective feels cluttered. Too many windows and each one is too small. (Even on 1900x screens). (Not CDT specific, but debugging was used with CDT).
- Valgrind was hard to install for them. Some didn't see what functionality the visual valgrind had that the command line version didn't. (But Valgrind extensively).
- Visual debugging (Main reason people setup Eclipse).
