I live in two worlds at the moment - supporting and maintaining a large PHP application (for which I use phpStorm) and developing .NET applications (for which I, obviously, use VS).

I've been a VS user for nigh-on 10 years now and always found the experience really fantastic. I think it's certainly more coherent that the IntelliJ-based IDEs (which, to be fair, are also very good).

Anyway, I'm genuinely surprised to see VS described as "horrid" - what specifically do you dislike about it?

"what specifically do you dislike about it?"

It's not the tooling I dislike it's the performance. No matter what I throw at it I still get the same experience. It feels like 95% of everything it does is blocking the UI.

Improving perf in VS is hard without massive rewrites. The fundamental problem is that this is originally a COM app (as in, heavily using COM to componentize itself) designed back in mid-90s. Consequently, you get all the wonders of things such as STA apartments, and code that insists running thereon.

As it gets rewritten, new managed bits don't care about all that stuff. But so long as there's one bit of legacy code anywhere in the particular flow that needs to run on STA (usually it's UI thread), you get this whole "you have 20 cores and 60 logical threads, but all those threads need to sync on STA, so everything is serialized and slow" thing.

Even for the new code, the problem is that all those old COM APIs that it needs to interact with (not just for VS itself, but also for the sake of backwards compatibility with third party extensions) are usually synchronous. So if you want background processing, you need to spawn a thread - but, of course, threads aren't free, either.

I have the same experience, on Visual Studio for Mac. I was debugging some C# code with an infinite loop the other day, and it locked up the debugger too! Every time. No way to pause and step through the program, so I had to rely on the OS crash log to figure out what was going wrong.

In my experience, IntelliJ has even worse performance. Xcode is better, at the cost of very limited features.

VS for .NET is a different beast than VS for C++, the latter being a far less tool-friendly environment. There's also the point that newer versions sometimes improve a lot over older ones, but licensing costs may keep people on older versions for too long (that, and the fact that with large C++ projects an upgrade is rarely straight-forward). This then ends up with people hating VS when all they've used is VS2008 on C++.

Not that I don't have any complaints (although those may very well be due to certain extensions), but I've always found VS to be much more responsive, stable, and featureful on the .NET side than C++; much of that certainly due to complexities of the respective languages.

FWIW I agree with you. Visual Studio looks like it was designed by fisher price, the whole thing takes up ~60gb of space, and if you're not running it on a high-end work station it's likely going to lag when editing large code bases. Not to mention it's closed source software.

It's against HN policy to downvote-bait.