What is the predominant development environment used?

Hi everyone!
I am asking this question partly out of curiosity and partly to improve my own efficiency.
What is the development environment(editor, plugins…) use by the developers over here and what OS do they work on?
I work on VSCode on Ubuntu and although I have followed the editor setup info on the wiki page, it is painfully slow to work with.

I am using VSCode on Ubuntu and think it works well, and fast. I wonder if it is because I have a nice beefy new machine with 24 cores and 64GB of memory, but who knows. (I also use XCode on a Macbook Pro, and Visual Studio on Windows; all work fine for me.)

I did find once or twice that VSCode got very slow. Quitting and starting again fixed that. I wonder if I did something that caused it (perhaps buggily) to go into a constant reindexing loop.

Probably is. I have a laptop with a 4 core i5 and 8GB of RAM. No wonder it gets stuck!

I used to have a 4 core i5 and it was OK for me. It had more memory though … I forget whether it was 16GB or 32GB. I suspect your memory is the bigger problem, vs the cpu.

You could try QtCreator, it works well for Blender development and is quite fast.

My feeling is that the predominant dev environment nowadays is Linux + VSCode. It’s certainly a good choice if you often switch between multiple languages. The extension based workflow is great for that. Its strength is the general customizability.

I’ve tried switching VSCode a few times now, very recently I used it exclusively for a few weeks. But I keep going back to Qt Creator. If you mainly work with C/C++ it is still a great choice. It just works faster, more reliable and with less quirks than VSCode for me (of course it still has some quirks, like any other option). Note that I’ve used it for years on rather low-end/old hardware, with just 8GB RAM.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Qt Creator’s Clang Code Model may cause a number of issues on some systems by default. If you experience issues like poor syntax highlighting, disabling the Clang Code Model plugin may help.

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Thank you @ideasman42 and @julianeisel.
QtCreator indeed is performing much better than VSCode.

Ah yes, one of the things that happens to college students: you are stuck with a laptop

Heh, well, more or less. For Blender work I actually used a desktop, but the hardware was far from the best (AMD Phenom II 965, 8GB RAM, GTX 560, …). Until 2.80 that was totally enough for working on Blender, at least for what I did. I’ve switched to SSDs early – if you want to do serious work in a code base like Blender, keep the source code on an SSD!

Nowadays, developing on such low-end/old hardware is more of an issue. Mainly due to higher graphics requirements and higher linking costs (single threaded). Linking tests is a major issue currently, they are barely usable on decent hardware even. I admit that I don’t build them regularly, “luckily” my area doesn’t have much coverage.
It’s also recommended to do debug builds with ASan enabled, which further affects linking performance and RAM usage.