VC2005 vs VC2010/12

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VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by syedhs »

Yes I am still using VC++ 2005 for my daily programming work :mrgreen: . Because it works, and I heard quite horrifying stories about newer version of VS (2008,2010) that seem to cater for .NET (rather than C++).
I am contemplating to upgrade to 2010 and then 2012, but what I am interested are two:-

1) Intellisense - is it working now? I tried loading up Ogre in VC2010 and a short test with Intellisense seems to me quite good. All member variables & functions are now properly shown in the drop-down combo box.

2) Pure code performance. Are the C++ compiler and linker are now improved that the same code now executes faster in 2010/12? I read that if STL & Boost are used extensively, then performance difference can be noticeable. In VC 2012, the compile now attempt to parallelize some code in for loop - so instead of executing sequentially, some of them are executed in other threads. Okay this looks good in theory, but I am looking for actual experience of seeing the performance increase.

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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Xavyiy »

+1, I'm in the same situation.

I've been using VC2005 since a very long time ago and I'm thinking in upgrading to VC2010 during this summer.

Kudos for some comparison between the -old- VC2005 and the new VC2010/12 for a daily usage.

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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Kojack »

I can barely remember 2005. Once I went to 2008 I never looked back.
In general I prefer 2008 to 2010, it's got a faster interface and works well enough. But my work place has (against my wishes) replaced 2008 with 2010 on all pcs, so I'm now using 2010 exclusively.
I found some of the stuff like tool tips when hovering over code was far better in 2008 (it had more useful info).
Some rough benchmarks I did a while ago had ogre running faster in 2012 than 2010 and faster in 2010 than 2008. But it was just a few fps and varied a bit.
2012 has some cool stuff in it (better c++ 11 support, a bunch of game related stuff, etc).
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Transporter »

Kojack wrote:In general I prefer 2008 to 2010, it's got a faster interface and works well enough.
Yes, the GUI is built with C++, C# and WPF. This needs more power than the "old" GUI from 2008.
Kojack wrote:Some rough benchmarks I did a while ago had ogre running faster in 2012 than 2010 and faster in 2010 than 2008.
I can confirm to that point.

I compiled boost+ogre on VS2010 and VS2012. VS2012 was always faster. I also like 2010/2012 because it's simple to extend. You can write extensions with VB.NET or C# very quick or record/play macros. MS promised to include the functions of the most popular VS2010 extensions native in VS2012.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Herb »

Microsoft claimed the compiler in 2010 was more optimized than 2008, but I don't have any data to validate that. The intellisense works much better in 2010, in my opinion. The downside for large projects is that the intellisense output is maintained in a sql server compact database, so it can really thrash your hard drive... But, I've adjusted some of the intellisense settings, and got it at a level I like. If only it was as good as KDevelop ;) Haven't looked at 2012 yet...
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by syedhs »

I think I can somehow conclude that by reading articles/postings/comments on the internet, it is better for me to stick to 2005 and waits the release of vs2012. Vs2010 somehow is worse that 2008 from C++ point of view and 2005 has more responsive IDE and I already have VisualAssist license to compensate for weak Intellisense in 2005. However, I am still interested to learn about actual experience of using VS2010 - positive experience that is.. :)
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Mikachu »

Overall, 2010's interface feels a bit heavy and unresponsive..
But I really like the red underlining of compile errors, without manually launching compilation... it helps catching those bugs faster (rather than waiting for the 15s long compile cycle..)
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Klaim »

To me, VS2010 is a big improvement on the features but is so slow that I sometime just open NotePad++ to braindump something.

From my experience, VS2012 (since Dev Preview at least) fixes this problem and add some good features.

I'm talking only about C++ obviously.

I would be you I wouldn't consider VS2010, it's mostly a change of architecture for future plans (a bit like the base of Vista being a "sanification" that allowed Win7).
I would wait to check the VS2012 and if it fits my need, switch to it.
As Mikachu said, the improvement on C++ side are still interesting in VS2010, in particular onthefly error checking.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by bstone »

I personally found the interactive error checking too intrusive for my style of coding since I often work "inside-out" (e.g. writing down an implementation before actually adding a declaration for it to the .h file) and get most of my code red all the time. That's somewhat distracting and slows the things down a bit. Disabled that and forgot it even existed.

The WPF UI is def slow, too slow after VS2008. The move from C++ to C# in their UI codebase is noticeable as well. I only live with that for the C++xx features in VC10 as they kick ass.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by jacmoe »

I am definitely using VC10 for it's features - and definitely not for the IDE.
It sucks.
Very much sucks.

I really can't see myself using vc8 or even vc9 - they actually fixed a lot of compiler bugs between versions - and vc10 is actually very decent.

Now, with GCC 4.7.x, it fell behind the curve. Looking forward to seeing if vc11 will catch up.

If you don't like the UI, then use QtCreator, NetBeans, Eclipse - anything - but still the vc10 toolchain.

It's a pity that KDevelop doesn't ship to Windows. :(
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by bstone »

jacmoe wrote:If you don't like the UI, then use QtCreator, NetBeans, Eclipse - anything - but still the vc10 toolchain.
I always tempted to try CDT for Eclipse but last time I checked (very very long ago) it was dead tailored toward the GCC toolchain. Maybe things changed since then?
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by jacmoe »

That's a very good question :)

I know that QtCreator does allow you to use the VC toolchain, and then I was hoping the NetBeans and Eclipse did as well..
Well, if they don't: they should.

Code::Blocks also allows you to choose the toolset.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by jacmoe »

I just went for a quick Google, and Eclipse CDT should allow you to choose the VC toolchain.
Although I found a topic from 2011 which said that it only works for 32bit, but that might have changed/improved.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by jacmoe »

NetBeans has a plugin to allow us to use the VC toolchain with it:
http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/42519/?show=true
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by SomeFusion »

I use Qt Creator on Windows for everything except debugging. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any VS I've tried. Works very well with any CMake based project and uses the VC tools for compilation.

Only recommended. Oh, and you can't beat the price :)
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Mikachu »

I tried NetBeans on windows recently, with the default (MingW) workflow, for a CMake based project.

Whilst the interface looks great, I think it still deserves a bit more work to get fully usable (for example, I can't find how to change CMake settings once the project is created, also there's that inconvenient bug with CMake..)

Yet, I try to keep VS alternatives on my radar, as I still find Visual Studio UI *very* sub-optimal (and things haven't evolved very much in the last decade).
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Klaim »

SomeFusion wrote:I use Qt Creator on Windows for everything except debugging. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any VS I've tried. Works very well with any CMake based project and uses the VC tools for compilation.

Only recommended. Oh, and you can't beat the price :)
It don't work well with C++11 features, right?
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Transporter »

I don't think that you can compare NetBeans or Eclipse with VS. Eclipse and NetBeans are primary Java IDEs and also written in Java. That creates a high memory consumption and makes them slow. Yes, they are slow! I had to work a few month with Eclipse and it was a hard time. They have some nice features which are missing in VS. Btw, the topic is about VC2005 vs VC2010/12 so let's get back to topic!

You should think about a few points to choose your VS version:
  • Less than 4 GB RAM? => Old VS
  • Support for old Platforms like WinCE 4 or Win2k? => Old VS
  • Primary development for Win7/Win8? => New VS
  • Need VS for WebDev? => New VS
  • Need C++11? => New VS
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by bstone »

Transporter wrote:Eclipse and NetBeans are primary Java IDEs and also written in Java. That creates a high memory consumption and makes them slow.
Transporter wrote:
  • Less than 4 GB RAM? => Old VS
That says it, doesn't it? :lol:

Yes, I remember Eclipse being slow on a box with 256MB RAM. Upgrading to 512MB made it pretty fast. But I don't even remember when that was already. I used Eclipse for Java and PHP development and speed never was an issue. VS10 on the other hand proved to be miserably slow, often locking here and there on a box with 3GB RAM. And I had to upgrade from 2GB just to make it usable at all.

Can't disagree on other points though.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Transporter »

Yes, looks strange. :D

The JRE take a lot of memory and is pretty slow. The old VS (GUI not written in WPF) use not so much memory and is really fast. Of course the new VS also use much memory but is still faster than Java. Btw, you don't need 4 GB RAM to run VS (my current VS10 takes about 54 MB), but if you run a large program like OGRE build you have a couple of instances for compiling.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by PhilipLB »

Hm, VS2010: 230mb ram, eclipse: 240mb ram. Not really different here. :)
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Cygon »

@PhilipLB: Visual Studio 2012 RC, after working on solution with 8 projects for 6 hours: 160 MB.

I have adopted Visual Studio 2010 on release day and was happy ever since. My main reason for the switch was that its project files now use MSBuild (an XML-based build scripting language like Ant or NAnt), letting me do automated builds of mixed C#/C++ projects and giving me a whole new class of customization options.

1. IntelliSense is still a story of its own. It works more often now. The IDE will still at times get confused if you include headers with deep dependencies or weird preprocessor constructs and sometimes IntelliSense takes a break for up to a minute. It's usable, but not dependable.

2. The VS2010 compiler is definitely ahead of VS2005. It can now make use of SSE2 instructions in normal code (in 2005, I think SSE2 was still only at home in intrinsics or MASM snippets of optimized math libraries). You also get shared_ptr and weak_ptr shipped with the compiler (VS2010 SP1 added C++ TR1)

But VS2012 tops it off: it has a vectorizing compiler with auto-parallelization. If you write a long loop that does not depend on the results of the previous iteration, for example, it will add multithreading to the loop if it is safe to do so (http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/sash ... lizer.aspx).
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by bstone »

Guys, you should really count the working set of all processes spawned by VS10. And there's a bunch of them.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Transporter »

bstone wrote:Guys, you should really count the working set of all processes spawned by VS10. And there's a bunch of them.
Yes, that's why I said 4 GB RAM :D MS starts a lot of compiler instances and controlling processes for the build process. This reduces CPU consumption of the IDE during build process. The Java-IDEs are also have to start external compilers. In my opinion VS10 does a good job, because all my 8 cores can be used efficient to compile ogre. That stupid JRE is blocking one core for it's own.

You can switch off most programs like the SQL server which are provided with VS. You don't need most of them for normal programming topics.
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Re: VC2005 vs VC2010/12

Post by Klaim »

Personally my only problem with Eclipse was random crashes, more frequent through time to the point I could work 10 minutes before a crash. Then I reinstall everything and it will work for a few weeks before re-starting to crash...

Could be a module problem, but then it means it's badly isolated.

Also, there are constant memory leaks. No way to avoid them it seems. So the memory comparison is not really good if you don't compare with VS through time.
VS2010 had problems too with big projects that said.
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