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

Re:Startup sure, but how fast does it run?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

From your comments it's apparent you're not a Java programmer then, because you merely repeat old complaints that are no longer valid. Ok, sure, the JRE takes up a bit of space but compared to the size of hard drives today the amount is trivial. Having the JRE on disk is like installing the MS or Borland libraries (or Linux counterparts) that some applications use - once it's there other applications don't have to include the code as part of the executable.

Swing suffers from obesity - what does that mean?

I've been developing Java applications for years (including a stint as project lead on a weather satellite imagery analysis program) and I know firsthand how much Java has improved. Spend some time writing applications in Java, using Swing (I use Netbeans for my IDE)...you'll see how sporty applications can be. Also check out Sun's Java Games community for some links to games that really exhibit excellent performance.

Re:Troll...Troll...Troll...

[gumpish]

And [Java] continues to be hyped, and is being used less and less, as the speed continues to hamper it.

Java is still some 40 times faster than Python. As hardware speed continues to obey Moore's law, performance per clock cycle becomes less important. (For many areas of computing anyway.)

obligatory pun

[1nv4d3r]

Thanks to the expected slashdotting, this is just one more eclipse I can't look directly at.

GCJ performance is a myth. Benchmarks inside.

[lokedhs]

In general, GCJ compiled code is slower than the smae code running in the JVM. The only speed advantage comes from the startup times.

Often the JVM will out-perform GCJ with a factor of 3. Check out the numbers on this page.

I fail to see why people want to run a GCJ compiled evrsion of a development tool and run at at one third of the speed of the JVM, just in order to save a few seconds of startup time.

Re:Memory Usage vs Eclipse Running in JVM

[thimo]

A quick test (using an Eclipse 2.1.1 from eclipse.org):

Eclipse 2.1.1 with JVM
- Second start: 13 seconds
- Memory Eclipse: 80 MB
- Memory JVM: 65 MB

Eclipse 2.0.1 without JVM
- Second start: 9 seconds
- Memory: 96 MB

The download page seems to indicate you're downloading an Eclipse 2.1.0 version, but the about dialog says 2.0.1. Which one is it?

Cheers,

Thimo (back to coding in Eclipse 2.1.1 :)