Difference between Android Studio and Eclipse for development and debugging

Question

What are the pro's and con's of using android studio instead of eclipse ?

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Note:: I have looked into the answers here answered by CommonsWare but it was not much clear in debugging tools

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1. Does Android Studio offers special debugging features which are not in eclipse ?

2. If so what are those ?

Solution 1

I have used extensively both IDE's. IMHO Android Studio is much better than Eclipse.
Some obvious advantages are:

1. It supports gradle (this allows you to really have control over the build, create different application flavors, different signing configurations and so on).
2. In the layout view you have the option to view both the actual layout and the xml at the same time, while in Eclipse you must choose between the two tabs.
3. It feels better. From doing a refactoring (like renaming a method, to extracting a class) to viewing the Logcat. The refactorings seem more solid and the Logcat does not "disappear" as it happens in Eclipse (although it must be noted that the filtering does not work that well).
4. Its the future. Sooner or later this is going to be the standard, as Google is actively developing it.

On the downside I can notice three things:

1. Still it is not that stable. For example if you want to view your project modules in the module view (as of v0.4.2 for Windows) I cannot see all of them. This actually means that in certain cases the only thing you can do is to build from command line and edit the gradle script.
2. Because is something relative new, many libraries are not supporting it out of the box, whereas in Eclipse, since it has been around for so long, everything is more or less trivial.
   One example of this, is Robolectric (the library that allows you to run android unit tests on your pc - i.e. over any jvm). I have really struggled to set up Robolectric in a gradle project, and I never managed to do it. In Eclipse it was quite easy.
3. The last thing is also related to the other ones: Since Android Studio is quite new, you may not find answers online for the problems that you face.
   

To sum up, sorry I went a bit beyond the debugging tools (although both of them use the same ddms, so there is no difference there, but I noticed Logcat has a difference, as mentioned above). There is no actual dilemma which one is better. Android Studio is, period. The point is when are you going to switch to it.

Just my two pennies.

Solution 2

Android studio is much clever. It understands context in which you are working (because it's built over IDEA). And for now it is stable enough to work with. I changed IDE from eclipse to IDEA and then to ADS, six month ago and very happy about this.

1. No, both of them give you full functionality of debugging process.