The VS team is powering quite a bit. I never had problems with instability or even memory usage, although people seem to pile on that quite a bit. Right now for example, my VS (preview version) has a huge solution opened, with resharper++. And it's just a little over a gig of memory usage. I think that's fair
I have resharper, too. And it's a mixed bag. It does a few things better, but also has bugs persistent over years without fixing. And its intellisense marks a lot of things as bugs which aren't, because it's much inferior to the official one.
I've been using VS for professional development in AAA games for over 10 years now, working with solutions of stupid sizes and I don't think I remember one instance of VS crashing, it just works, which is very unlike an MS product. My only gripe is that Intellisense is close to useless, but that's solved by installing Visual Assist, great product.
The differences in experiences are huge. I use VS occasionally and basically expect something to be broken every time. Maybe I'll open a project and the error list will be full of "type Object unknown / type String unknown". Maybe the editor will be empty. Maybe the publishing will claim the existing artefact is newer than what I'm building. Maybe autocomplete won't work. That's literally my list from just this week.
A restart of VS usually fixes the most recent issue or replaces it with a different one. That's been my life for the last 3 years.
Visual Studio C++ programmer here. My Visual Studio crashes depends a lot on the last update. Some updates work correctly, another ones have a lot of crashes. Now I have like three or four crashes per day with the last one (no problem with the previous one).
As someone that uses it for both workloads, it does just fine, don't load it with lots of plugins.
If anything, plugins creating havoc on host processes have given a reason why extensibility should be done out of process with IPC, despite consuming more resources.
Not only on VS, on other IDEs as well.
Given that, it is no surprise that the new extensibility API is out-of-process.
Also c++ dev and I use Xcode also on a daily basis. VS is the best IDE for me and I have tried them all. Solid, excellent debugging tools. I think it helps that I generate my solutions from CMake so they are always “fresh” and not really old ones that have been upgraded multiple times, which I suspect is the cause of many issues in VS.
I also did a fair bit of .net in my last job and I could not live without Resharper C#. If the company wouldn’t have paid for it then I would. Resharper C++ is not good though.
At the time the reason for switching were some neat code improvements that resharper could do that VA couldn't. Most of those are now part of VS itself though. I'd actually have to go through my keybinds to see which are actually resharper functionality. I always liked VSs "list all functions in this file", never found a good replacement for that.
Yeah, I've also started having those info bars on subsystems like Intellisense crashing when trying to popup the context menu to present refactoring options etc. It began less than a year ago.
As for functionality, they can take a look at Reshaper.