CLion vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

CLion

Stacks374

Followers596

Votes224

Visual Studio Code

Stacks185.7K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

CLion vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

CLion and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) are popular integrated development environments (IDEs) used for software development. Following are the key differences between CLion and Visual Studio Code:

Language Support: CLion is primarily focused on C and C++ development and provides extensive support for these languages. It offers advanced code analysis, refactoring tools, and seamless integration with CMake build system. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code is a versatile IDE that supports a wide range of programming languages through extensions. It provides language-specific extensions for C and C++ development, but its language support is not as specialized as CLion.
Integrated Tools and Features: CLion comes with integrated tools specifically tailored for C and C++ development. It includes a powerful debugger, code profiler, unit testing framework, and version control integration. CLion also offers advanced code completion, code navigation, and error detection capabilities. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is highly extensible and customizable. It provides a vast collection of extensions that allow developers to add functionality for various programming languages, version control systems, and other tools.
Project Management: CLion offers a robust project management system that integrates with CMake build system and allows for seamless project configuration and building. It provides automatic code generation, project templates, and a visual debugger for efficient project development. Visual Studio Code, while not as specialized in project management as CLion, offers a flexible workspace environment. It provides features like multi-root workspaces, task runners, and Git integration.
User Interface and Ease of Use: CLion provides a polished and dedicated IDE experience with a focused user interface tailored for C and C++ development. It offers a comprehensive set of menus, toolbars, and dedicated windows for code editing, debugging, and project management. Visual Studio Code follows a lightweight and minimalist design approach, providing a clean and customizable user interface. It allows users to personalize the layout, install custom themes, and configure various preferences.
Licensing and Cost: CLion is a commercial IDE developed by JetBrains and requires a license for commercial use. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is a free and open-source IDE developed by Microsoft.

In summary, CLion is a specialized IDE for C and C++ development, offering advanced language support, integrated tools, and project management capabilities. Visual Studio Code, while not as specialized, provides a versatile and extensible development environment with support for multiple programming languages through extensions.

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Advice on CLion, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

CLion	Visual Studio Code
Knowing your code through and through, CLion can take care of the routine while you focus on the important things. Boost your productivity with the keyboard-centric approach (Vim-emulation plugin is also available in plugin repository), full coding assistance, smart and relevant code completion, fast project navigation, intelligent intention actions, and reliable refactorings.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Smart Editor;Code Generation;CMake; Debugger;Universal Environment;Git, Mercurial, and Perforce support	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 374	Stacks 185.7K
Followers 596	Followers 169.1K
Votes 224	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 31 Good editor 30 Easy setup 24 Already one of the best C/C++ IDEs, even before launch 24 Powerful refactoring, extremely smart IDE 21 Cross-platform build Cons 2 Not free, unless you are a student 2 No good support for Makefiles	Pros 340 Powerful multilanguage IDE 309 Fast 193 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 13 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to CLion, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.