Fast Native Eclipse with GTK+ Looks

Mark Wielaard writes "The gcj team created a natively compiled build of the Eclipse IDE. The resulting binary starts up faster then with any traditional JVM since there is no virtual machine to initialize or slow byte code interpreter or just in time compiler involved. This means that gcj got a lot better since the last Slashdot story in December about gcj and Eclipse. Red Hat provides RPMs for easy installation. Footnotes has screenshots by Havoc Pennington of the Eclipse IDE with GTK+ widgets."

Comments

Microsoft's IDEs? You have GOT to be kidding

[MichaelCrawford]

Using Microsoft's IDEs - I have VC++ both 6 and 7 - is like pounding nails with my fists.

Have you used Metrowerks Codewarrior? Now there's an IDE. It's a joy to use. Runs on Mac and Windows. I think there is a Linux version that uses gcc, but I haven't tried it.

(I admit I haven't tried Eclipse yet, but I would be very surprised if it were better than CodeWarrior.)

Everything Just Works in CodeWarrior. I've even got my wife, a web designer who prefers to hand-code her HTML, to use it to write her web pages.

CodeWarrior supports C, C++, Java and inline assembly. If you prefer makefiles, there are command line tools that provide the same compiler. Old versions of CodeWarrior also supported Pascal, but I don't think they do anymore.

The ISO compliance of CodeWarrior's C++ is far superior to Visual C++'s, and has been quite compliant for a very long time. I've been happily using the Standard Template Library in very complex ways, as well as writing my own fancy templates, for several years.

Alexei Alexandrescu used CodeWarrior to develop the heavily templated source code for Modern C++ Design. Visual C++ can't compile it because of its poor compliance to the standard.

It is also available for many embedded systems. Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola a while back, who makes the ColdFire and PowerPC processors that are important in the embedded world.