I have zero familiarity with Pros but I use Pycharm, IntelliJ, and cloud9 on a regular basis. I like that Pros is similar to those IDEs, but I have a few questions. Does Pros have the same functionality as RobotC in the following areas?
the many debugger windows for troubleshooting
libraries/APIs
regular updates/support
extensive sample programs
datalogging(haven’t used this yet but plan to very soon)
…anything else I may be missing
What is the advantage of Pros besides the similarity to a production IDE?
Minor technicality: PROS can be used with any IDE of choice, despite being optionally bundled with Atom.
Definitely lacking out of the box (literally only supports basic text-based messages), but PROS also has the benefit of theoretically infinite expandability Example], as it uses a standard serial protocol for debugging.
Libraries for C in general are probably easier to work with.
VEX-specific libraries are usually in RobotC, but can be ported to PROS.
For the target audience (more advanced coders) as compared to RobotC (mix of both advanced coders and novices that need hand-holding), I would say PROS is plenty good about regular updates. As far as support, the PROS community is often just as quick to respond here on the Forum as the RobotC community.
There’s a trade-off here. PROS unquestionably lacks the extensive sample program library of RobotC, but also has documentation multiple orders of magnitude better than RobotC: PROS, PROS, PROS, RobotC
If your computer is capable of browsing the modern internet while running a mainstream Linux distro, it’s probably good enough for PROS. RobotC requires a decent Windows PC.
Flash memory available is wrong, you get pretty close to 370k with robotC too. It’s at least over 300k, we crammed our Cortex with wav files last season.