Visual Studio 6 (1998) is an unappreciated piece of art for what it was back in the day and even by today's standards.

I'd respectfully disagree on VS 6. It was OK for its time, but hardly a piece of art, in my experience.

Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment.

VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.

Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.

Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.

And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly.

But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.

Compared to modern IDEs it won't do very well, but do you remember better alternatives back then, at least if you wanted a "friendly" UI instead of a command line one? Would you choose something different if you go back to 2005? how about 1998?

Oh, back at the time it was a good. IDE. There was also C++ Builder, but it had its own quirks, of course. Picking one of them was, I guess, a matter of personal preference, the project's requirements, etc.

Anyway, I sure see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others. Comparing a modern IDE to its old version in the context of software bloat is the whole point I'm trying to make.

I think bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than its old versions and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.

It was great for the context of 1990's IDEs, and most people would use plugins anyway.

Visual Assist being a well known one.

It isn't as if JetBrains products aren't full of plugins as well.

Yes, Visual Assist is the name, thank you.

I see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others.

A better idea woud've been comparing a modern version of VS with VS 6, for example.

Anyway, my point is bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than the old and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.

This is a bit similar to the concept of accidental vs inherent complexity in sw engineering. There's accidental bloat and inherent "bloat", so to speak:)

My impression is people don't usually acknowledge the existence of inherent "bloat" in discussions like this one.

Can't comment on Java support in Eclipse back then.

VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.

Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.

Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.

But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.

Writing C++ in Eclipse CDT or KDevelop was simply a pain.

Actually, a plain editor with syntax highlight was probably a better option because it was not even pretending to have "smart" features that would inevitably break on each non-trivial piece of code -- better no promises than false promises.

Delphi, and C++ Builder for that matter, were great as a package: fast GUI builder, editor, debugger, etc. That said, I don't remember them offering much in terms of working with code: finding an identifier usages, refactoring, etc.

As to praising JB, it wasn't my intent to single them out, surely there're other great IDEs. Their products is just something I'm personally familiar with. If something better happens to cross my way, I'll have no problems switching.

VS 6 is from 1998, not 2005.

Point taken. Didn't mean to say its release date is 2005, but that's definitely not obvious from my comment.

It was still mainstream in 2005, I think. Do you remember if I get that right? At least we were using it at work in 2005.

VS release cadence is much faster nowadays, isn't it? :)

There were 2 releases between VS6 and VS2005, so slightly slower than the current cadence of a new release every couple of years but not by much. I think VS6 remained popular for a long time because it was the last release before they switched to the heavier .NET-based IDE.

> I think VS6 remained popular for a long time because it was the last release before they switched to the heavier .NET-based IDE.

The in my opinion the much more important reason was that Visual Studio 6 was the last version of Visual Studio that was capable of running under Windows 9x (every version of Visual Studio that was released after required some Windows-NT-based Windows version; Visual Studio .NET 2002 was the last version to run under Windows NT 4.0: Visual Studio .NET 2003 required at least Windows 2000; keep in mind that Windows XP came only out end of October 2001).