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Eclipse Foundation Celebrates 10 Years

Posted by Unknown on from the emacs-is-still-better dept.

msmoriarty writes with news that the Eclipse foundation is ten years old this week. Although Eclipse was released in 2001, development was controlled by IBM until the creation of the independent Eclipse Foundation in 2004. "According to Eclipse Foundation Director Mike Milinkovich, that's a major reason Eclipse was able to thrive: 'IBM....did an exemplary job of setting Eclipse free ... We became the first open source organization to show that real competitors could collaborate successfully within the community.' He also talks about misconceptions about Eclipse, its current open source success, and what he sees for the future."

109 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Timeline wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The Eclipse line was phased out by 1989. Heck, Data General wasn't even a company anymore by 2001.

    1. Re:Timeline wrong? by ebno-10db · · Score: 1, Funny

      Welcome to Slashdot, where a joke gets you a -1. Some mod needs another cup of coffee.

  2. Still using it by hansamurai · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even though I've owned a copy of IntelliJ IDEA for over a year, I still use Eclipse everyday for Java development. Latest version is great and the extensions available for it make it even better.

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
    1. Re:Still using it by clockwise_music · · Score: 1, Troll

      I've used Basica, GW-Basic, QBasic, Logo, Visual Basic for DOS, VB6, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, Watcom, Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008/2010/2012, Netbeans, XCode, Notepad, Notepad++, Vi, Watcom, Progress4GL and Eclipse.

      Hands down, Eclipse was the slowest and most confusingest I've ever used out of ALL of the above.

    2. Re:Still using it by Dwedit · · Score: 1

      You must be exaggerating, since GW-BASIC required you to manually type in line numbers, just like on an Apple II. Eclipse may be bloated and sluggish, but at least you don't need to type in line numbers.

    3. Re:Still using it by Mitchell314 · · Score: 1

      As fuggin verbose as java can be, not requiring line numbers is the least it can do. :P

      --
      I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
    4. Re:Still using it by Volguus+Zildrohar · · Score: 3, Funny

      AUTO 100, 10

      Suddenly GW-Basic is rivalling Eclipse as an IDE!

      --
      When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
    5. Re:Still using it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Wish my experience was the same, it's the contrary, I still avoid using it where possible.

      It's still a sluggish bloated memory hog unless you're running it on a high spec system which doesn't describe the hardware most companies buy and which every other IDE runs fine on. None of which would be a problem if it weren't for the fact that it means intellisense is so slow it fails to respond before you've already typed a line of code manually meaning it gives you no advantage in writing code faster, no that Eclipse's intellisense is particularly smart anyway. The plugin system is still broken such that if you want to work with multiple languages and technologies you need multiple copies of Eclipse installed.

      I'm not terribly sure what they've actually done in the last 10 years, these were the same key complaints people had back then, and they're still relevant to this day.

      Eclipse is just like PHP, it's popular, widely used, but ultimately only through dumb luck, not because it has any real actual redeeming features that make it better than the alternatives.

      Eclipse is the sort of bloated sluggish mess that gives Java an undeserved bad name.

    6. Re:Still using it by alex67500 · · Score: 1

      Should have used emacs... :-D

    7. Re:Still using it by ebno-10db · · Score: 1, Interesting

      It's still a sluggish bloated memory hog ...

      I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it's written in Java. Seriously, I don't know but I'm curious. This is not meant as flamebait (though I'm still glad I wore my Nomex undies today).

      Whenever I see Java benchmarks, they let a program "warm up" (like it was made of vacuum tubes) before taking benchmark numbers. For things that run many times over, like server side stuff, that makes sense. But what about client side stuff like Eclipse? Does anybody have benchmarks for non-JIT'ed code? I understand you have to run the same piece of code many times (I've heard 10k) before it will be JIT'ed. A similar issue with memory. It seems that in order to run efficiently you need a heap that's much bigger than what you'd need if things were "manually" allocated/deallocated.

    8. Re:Still using it by Threni · · Score: 1

      When I first read that speed was one of the three design goals of Java I assumed it was a joke and laughed. Apparently it's not a joke.

    9. Re:Still using it by jrumney · · Score: 1

      JIT compilation happens the first time you run code. Its the runtime optimizations that require code to be run thousands of times so the VM can tell which code paths need optimising the most.

    10. Re:Still using it by MareLooke · · Score: 1

      It's still a sluggish bloated memory hog ...

      I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it's written in Java. Seriously, I don't know but I'm curious. This is not meant as flamebait (though I'm still glad I wore my Nomex undies today).

      Java (or the JVM) likes memory, lots of it. But that's not the (only) reason Eclipse is a memory hog as other Java based IDEs (NetBeans and IntelliJ come to mind) manage to do much better on the same system. I'm not even sure that Eclipse uses that much memory compared to the competition, but it sure is more sluggish in use and it hasn't improved in that area in as long as I can remember.

      My experience is the same as the AC you replied to, Eclipse pretty much hasn't evolved in a meaningful way (for an end-user, maybe the platform is great to work with, I wouldn't know) since I first used it back in college (iow, 10 years ago) and that is a shame.

      Dealing with plugins (and their update centers, oh dear) is still a major pain, it still doesn't support basic features natively (I mean when I last tried it half a year ago there still was no Subversion support in the default install. I mean, really? Hunting down the plugin for it was a pain as well) On top of that Eclipse's maven support is simply atrocious which imho is entirely unacceptable for a modern Java IDE.

      The one thing it has (imho) going for it is that Oracle has dropped pretty much all non-Java language support from NetBeans, meaning that if you need proper support for a non-Java JVM language Eclipse is where you go (unless you want to shelve out for IntelliJ or can make do with IntelliJ's free edition). Eclipse is also the platform used for most commercial Java ecosystem plugins, so if you are dependant on some of those you're probably stuck with Eclipse.

      I personally went from being an Eclipse user, to a NetBeans user and now I'm using IntelliJ. I still use the other IDEs occasionally, if only to keep up-to-date with their status and be able to support my colleagues with various issues, but until Eclipse actually starts improving in areas that matter (UI, plugin management and a sane default feature set) it's just never going to be my go to-IDE again.

    11. Re:Still using it by Yosho · · Score: 2

      Pop quiz: How many languages can you name that don't compile to machine code and are faster than Java?

      --
      Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
    12. Re:Still using it by ebno-10db · · Score: 1

      That makes sense, though it also helps explain Java's slow startup times.

    13. Re:Still using it by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 2

      You must be exaggerating, since GW-BASIC required you to manually type in line numbers, just like on an Apple II. Eclipse may be bloated and sluggish, but at least you don't need to type in line numbers.

      Now go figure out where they put the "turn on line numbers" function in Eclipse this quarter...

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    14. Re:Still using it by fractoid · · Score: 1

      I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this. To be fair, it's been years since I used Eclipse, and it's probably improved out of sight (and/or computers being 1000x faster now compensates for the unwieldyness of Java) but last time I did use Eclipse, it was painfully chuggy.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    15. Re:Still using it by fractoid · · Score: 1

      Java as we now know it is nothing like the language as it was originally envisaged. It was originally meant to be a high level language for low powered embedded systems.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    16. Re:Still using it by pr0fessor · · Score: 1

      I recently wanted to play around with uzebox and I ran into issues setting up eclipse, the documentation was unsurprisingly hard to find, I ended up just getting Atmel AVR Studio. It wouldn't really be fair to compare them.

      {setting it up for some off the wall piece of hardware is difficult when the solution designed specifically for that purpose works out of the box... not really fair}

      It did appear a little heavy and I wouldn't consider using it for most projects and especially not at work where I have well documented tools specifically designed for what I'm doing.

    17. Re:Still using it by skids · · Score: 1

      Each language has its nuances. In Java, if you write bad code, you get slowness and RAM hogging and so many classes that most people decide to use the developer documentation to heat their homes rather than work woth it. In, say, Perl if you write bad code you get line noise and unreadable source. I've seen some Java client-side applications that run perfectly fast (minus the initial VM startup), and not because they were doing something simple. Heck one even gave me a glimpse of the good-ol-days when you didn't have to refresh the screen manually to get evrything that should have updated to actually update and keys made characters appear WHEN you typed them not half a second later. This despite all the drawbacks of running on a VM that is far divorced from the hardware (doesn't even have uints.)

      One can speculate on what makes some development outfits competent and others not. Certainly, having an automated test system that flags performance penalties as regressions couldn't hurt.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    18. Re:Still using it by laejoh · · Score: 2

      Assembly!

    19. Re:Still using it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      C# has the advantage of actually compiling into an executable or service without requiring addons

      False. You need to install the add-on known as the .NET Framework. And you better make DAMN sure you've got the right version for what you're targetting!

    20. Re:Still using it by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Lua is one.

    21. Re:Still using it by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      There are multiple versions of Eclipse bundles some which which come with all relevant plugins installed.

    22. Re:Still using it by Raenex · · Score: 1

      No it isn't.

    23. Re:Still using it by MareLooke · · Score: 1

      None come with Subversion support, they tout CVS and Git support though, but the reality is that most companies, will still be using Subversion, so the majority of people will have to hunt for at least this plugin (of which there are two competing ones, so you get the joy of figuring out which one to use as well).

      The various bundles (there seem to be more every time I check the Eclipse website...) also seem more like a crutch to compensate for how horrible it is to find and install all the plugins one would need. They also seem to cater to some person's idea of what a certain type of developer would need rather than their actual needs, leading to loads of superfluous cruft installed and needed plugins still being missing as for example the JEE package doesn't appear to be a superset of the Java developer one.

      Of course one could install a whole bunch of different Eclipse bundles just to have access to all the stuff one needs, judging from the descriptions I would need 2 or 3 Eclipse installs and I would still need to hunt down the Subversion plugin.

      Let's just be honest, installing Eclipse and acquiring all the plugins you need is a pain in the neck and always has been (though given that the number of plugins available has gone up one could make the argument that it's become worse). The bundles seem more like an excuse to leave the festering pit of refuse that is Eclipse's plugin management alone instead of fixing it. Both NetBeans and IntelliJ do a much better job in this regard and I wish the Eclipse devs would take a look over the fence for ideas on how it should be done instead of making excuses for something that has been broken for 10 years.

    24. Re:Still using it by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      No, it's a joke. The only variable is how much of a joke. With all the JIT knobs turned to 11, Java only manages 50-75% of the performance of C++ with a recent compiler, and that is not even counting the suckage of the JIT firing up.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    25. Re:Still using it by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Now it's the new COBOL.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    26. Re:Still using it by clockwise_music · · Score: 1

      Actually, it didn't, I believe you could type 10 then newline, and then it would auto generate them for you. But this is remembering stuff from 25 years ago so I could be wrong :)

  3. Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuilder? by GoodNewsJimDotCom · · Score: 1

    I hear Flashbuilder is built on top of Eclipse. I need to quit every day and restart because of a memory leak that slows everything down to a crawl with massive type lag of 1s+ between key presses. Its so easy to get stuff done in AS3 compared to any other language, but I often feel like I'm fighting the IDE.

    --
    God spoke to me
  4. Re:Java by binarylarry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Java can be pretty quick these days, lots of hard work went into optimizing the runtime.

    There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++ (although C++ is inherently faster and lighterweight). But it can't optimize virtual calls away like the JVM can.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbeans by mark-t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I always found Eclipse to be very fidgety, and I've only ever been able to get one non-java project debugging properly inside of it. Conversely, netbeans ... well.. it just works. It has full C++11 support these days, and is, in my opinion, much friendlier to pure java development, using ant as its native build tool.

    (My money's on this comment being modded down by eclipse fanboys, ah, but what the hell, I'll post it anyways.)

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  6. Eclipse by rossdee · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    All that you touch
    All that you see
    All that you taste
    All you feel.
    All that you love
    All that you hate
    All you distrust
    All you save.
    All that you give
    All that you deal
    All that you buy,
    beg, borrow or steal.
    All you create
    All you destroy
    All that you do
    All that you say.
    All that you eat
    And everyone you meet
    All that you slight
    And everyone you fight.
    All that is now
    All that is gone
    All that's to come
    and everything under the sun is in tune
    but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

    "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."
     

    1. Re:Eclipse by TheloniousToady · · Score: 1

      I suppose you'll be quoting Pink Floyd's "Bitcoin" next...

  7. Giant contribution by bug_hunter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Eclipse and Java make a bit of a unique pair. Java is massively verbose by today's standards, but it's strict typing and highly declarative approach allows your IDE to do amazing things when it comes to refactoring or code analysis. Then there's the fact that Eclipse is by no means just a Java IDE, but that's just part of its giant eco-system.

    Eclipse is one of the reasons I was super sad that Oracle bought Java instead of IBM. IBM at least proved they can make a good product using Java, using its strengths and subverting its weaknesses.

    --
    It's turtles all the way down.
    1. Re: Giant contribution by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      Uhm, Java IS the standard these days.

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    2. Re: Giant contribution by hibiki_r · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Depending on the kind of development you are on, maybe. There's plenty of people moving to shinier things though, mainly due to Java's excessive verbosity and lack of support of functional features. For insance, you see Fortune 500 companies placing ads for Scala developers. And people don't move to Scala because they have nostalgia for the C++ era's compile times. There's plenty of growth out there by other second tier languages who people choose to increase speed of development. And there's of course C#, which actually attempts to evolve at a decent rate.

      So while Java is still a very used language in industry, you won't see any language getting any uptake today if they replicate Java's love for boilerplate.

      We could also talk about the tools that are often used with Java that just promote the mindless verbosity. We all remember how terrible EJB 1.0 and 2.0 were. But then we got Spring and Hibernate, which are only slightly better than the disease. You can choose between monstruous XML formats with no real type checking, leading to a whole lot of runtime errors, or annotations that are slightly less verbose, and yet are just as prone to runtime errors. You end up needing such high test coverage to double check for those 'helpful' technologies that you might as well have been using a purely dynamic language in the first place: It's not as if the compiler protects you from careless mistakes in annotations or XML files. To offset this, we need an IDE and some complex configuration, raising the bar for building even the simplest application. No wonder people found Rails so refreshing when it first came out.

    3. Re: Giant contribution by clockwise_music · · Score: 1

      You can choose between monstruous XML formats with no real type checking, leading to a whole lot of runtime errors, or annotations that are slightly less verbose, and yet are just as prone to runtime errors.

      This. THIS.

      I was so happy to ditch Java after 2 years and move to .NET. Java is just configuration hell. Everything takes twice as long because you're fighting the infrastructure instead of actually getting stuff to work. The language itself is the easy part - it's the setup, the config files, the extra config files, the extra extra extra XML files... hell on a stick. Eclipse didn't make it easier, it made it even harder. I couldn't believe how easy c# and visual studio was in comparison. And because Microsoft seemed to have completely ripped of Java's syntax for .NET it was a cinch making the switch.

    4. Re:Giant contribution by Zeromous · · Score: 1

      Why would IBM buy Java? They roll their own JVM.

      --
      ---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
    5. Re: Giant contribution by Threni · · Score: 1

      Get someone to check out a c# solution containing a number of projects, and open it in visual studio. (Clue: double click on the .sln file, then...oh, that's it). Then get someone to do the same for a java project in Eclipse.

      How does .net not need all the hand holding and class-path manipulation and importing and so on? Conversely, what does Eclipse provide java developers which .net cannot?

    6. Re: Giant contribution by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      what does Eclipse provide java developers which .net cannot?

      Source code availability, for one thing. More popular language for another.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    7. Re: Giant contribution by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Available outside of Windows as well.

    8. Re: Giant contribution by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      If you don't do it properly your VS project will start failing because of bad hard paths all over the projects. Its not as trivial as you say.

      But yeah Java is too verbose.

  8. For the haters by ADRA · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using Eclipse on for pretty much 10years now and by and large, the tool has been pretty darn soliod. its a memory pig so get over it. I throw 1.5G at the heap and though it rarely if ever gets close to it, the amout of speed it performs mosdt operations is amazing.

    There are warts which I find personally lousy (like Mylyn of the built-in profiler, and much of the built-in text validators), but thankfully most of those can be trivially turned off and tweaked to speed up usage even more. With a few choice plug-ins, you can do a lot of the hard lifting without effort.

    I've only had cursory usage of Netbeans/Idea, but Kepler is really a dream to use. Note, almost every first few months of a new release are generally ass, and Juno was entirely ass so be warned. Just because one version of Eclipse may be a flake, don't discount the platform.

    --
    Bye!
    1. Re:For the haters by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      My 2010 era machine runs it fine with 8 gigs. Some folks have really old machines as the corps now look at IT as an expense rather than an asset and tax write off.

      No one besides a secretary should have an XP machine with 2 gigs of ram in 2014. You throw productivity away otherwise.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    2. Re:For the haters by Peter+Mork · · Score: 1

      ADRA's experiences mirror by own. I've been using Eclipse for more than 10 years. There have been some hiccups, but the fact that I have been able to debug Java, SQL, JavaScript, C++, LaTeX, XSD, Schematron, and a few others, all in the same environment, while interacting with multiple code repositories convinces me that it's a solid product.

  9. and yet... by buddyglass · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...I'm still running 3.7 because the 4.x releases are (by all accounts) still not "fixed". Sigh.

    1. Re:and yet... by buddyglass · · Score: 1

      True. I was led to believe 3.8 was just "3.7 plus all available updates". But, yeah, I could. I notice that the Android ADT is based on 3.8.

  10. Re:Java by SQLGuru · · Score: 1

    Agreed. As a development environment, I really dislike Eclipse. The Visual Studio tool line is great (whether you like MS or not, it's a very developer-friendly tool). Eclipse is very cumbersome to use and seems to take forever for tasks that shouldn't. While I like that it's flexible, I'd rather just use Notepad++ and a command line compiler than run Eclipse.

  11. Seems to freeze less on CentOs VM than Win7 physic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I've been using Eclipse for a few months on CentOs virtual machines for MapReduce development. The Maven m2e plugin is a huge boon. I never noticed Eclipse freezing unless it was doing something like cleaning the workspace, or updating the Maven local repo, or something like that, in which case it tells me it's doing something.

    I started doing more Java SE work, so I loaded the same setup onto my workstation that hosts the VMs, which is a pretty decent Win7 machine, and now sometimes it just freezes, then catches up really quickly like lag in an online game...still stays pretty darn normal in Linux. Weird.

  12. Re:Java by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

    memory: did you tweak your heap size in eclipse.ini?

  13. Re:Java by 0123456 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++ (although C++ is inherently faster and lighterweight). But it can't optimize virtual calls away like the JVM can.

    It's not virtual calls that make Eclipse randomly freeze for ten seconds or more. And I've wasted more time having to hit CTRL+C a dozen times to get it to copy than I ever have in virtual function calls in C++. Or restarting it when it runs out of RAM despite having a ton free on the machine, or runs out of handles because they're not closing something properly because, hey, garbage collection will take care of that, right?

    Eclipse is a decent IDE when it works, but I'm sure it would work a lot better if it wasn't written in Java.

  14. 10 years... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...and I'm still waiting for it to load!

    1. Re:10 years... by clockwise_music · · Score: 1

      LOL.

    2. Re:10 years... by OhANameWhatName · · Score: 1

      lol

  15. Re:Java by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 1

    What the hell would you be doing where optimizing a vtable lookup away will matter in the slightest?

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  16. Re:Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbea by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    It's made by Oracle. Enough said

    What I really want to type is Java is dying and a security nightmare, but sadly this ancient relic like IE 6 and Cobol won't die fast enough. I hate having apps requiring one version that conflict and constantly infects the same systems over and over again due to the +100 security holes!! I have read many posters switching to c++ for these reasons

    Like SCO you hurt the Foss by using Oracle products.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  17. If you need Flashbuilder, try Mac by raymorris · · Score: 1

    I don't use Flashbuilder that much, as I prefer their other tool, but I've never had a problem with any version of Flashbuilder on my Mac. It might be worth a try if the Windows version isn't working for you.

    Flash Professional might be another option.

    1. Re:If you need Flashbuilder, try Mac by Tronster · · Score: 1

      I have FlashBuilder on my Mac, I only use it when deploying a project to iOS - it is awful. One example: With the latest version (4.7) I deleted a project through the OS X Finder on my hard drive, that I had previously built with FlashBuilder. Afterwards it refused to start up, immediately crashing/closing, even after a reinstall of the entire Adobe suite (a recommendation on various forums.) It took a few hours combing through posts to find a helpful one that mentioned some obscure user data directory that had to be deleted.

      Who writes an IDE that crashes when a project on disk is gone?

      It's for this, and various other reasons, I continue to use the free, open-source alternative FlashDevelop ( http://flashdevelop.org/ ) for my Flash IDE. It's the only reason I keep a Parallels partition on my MacBook Pro.

  18. Re:Java by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 2, Funny

    Dude, quit complaining and buy a new computers.

    No seriously, that wasn't a typo.

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
  19. Re:Java by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++

    The JVM is written in C++.

  20. Re:Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbea by mark-t · · Score: 1

    I have no love for Oracle, but I use netbeans because, as I said... it works. And it works better than anything else I've tried.

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  21. Re:Java by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "but I'm sure it would work a lot better if it wasn't written in Java."

    I'd give up the modest goal "work a lot better" and trade it in for "it happens to work a lot".

    Exits quickly, but Eclipse is spectacularly slow preventing actual work from getting done. It is like a low FPS video game where the problem is supposed to be your setup, but I've never found a computer powerful enough to run Eclipse at a tolerable speed considering my impatience.

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
  22. Try to keep up by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 1

    It's called RonPaulCoin now. Geez!

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
  23. The modern emacs by oldhack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Eclipse has become a universe onto itself. It's got its own GUI kit, thread model, all kinds of stuff I'm too drunk to name at this moment.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    1. Re:The modern emacs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      except you can use emacs to do things

    2. Re:The modern emacs by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Edit the code in emacs then let eclipse open it if the boss is watching.

  24. OSGi by emorning · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of the most awesome things that the Eclipse people did was switch to a foundation built on OSGi after the first version. Eclipse is a showcase that showcase the power of a modular component framework.
    Sun really screwed up by failing to adopt OSGi for Java's module system.

    When I think of the best technologies available to the average Java developer like myself I rank the JVM first and OSGi second.

    With setup boxes now set to become ubiquitous, I want a box that integrates some OSGi-like framework that will enable me to integrate all the devices in my house.

    1. Re:OSGi by dkf · · Score: 1

      One of the most awesome things that the Eclipse people did was switch to a foundation built on OSGi after the first version.
      Eclipse is a showcase that showcase the power of a modular component framework.

      The silly thing is that Eclipse is actually close to being the poster child for how not to do an application on top of OSGi. Equinox itself (the OSGi layer) is fine, but Eclipse effectively works very hard to not use the power it provides, instead doing its own weird things with class loaders that mean that you're stuck in a horrible limbo land where nothing quite works as you might hope.

      --
      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    2. Re:OSGi by lehphyro · · Score: 1

      OSGi is a mess, I'm glad we're not going to use a runtime solution for something best solved at build time such as modularity for Java.

  25. Re:Java by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Eclipses quarks have nothing to do with java. Have you ever looked at the code behind eclipse? It's terrifying!

    The way they handle tasking/progress is particularly bad (and the reason why it'll get hung up during certain operations.. it gets stuck in deadloops/race conditions and just chews through memory).

    It's actually amazing how well it (generally) works, quarks aside.. given how shaky the code is. I like to think of it as a pile of crap that's been sculpted into something mostly usable.

  26. Re:Java by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Have you ever looked at the code behind eclipse? It's terrifying!

    No, I haven't. But I'll concede that anyone who can write bad code in Java can write much worse code in C++.

  27. Re:Java by Anrego · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the limited time I've spent in eclipse's code, it seems a case of poorly done decoupling. It's layers upon layers of abstraction that's expected to just kinda sort itself out, which of course it doesn't and things end up in loops until the operation either times out, fails, or something changes that lets it get out of the loop and maybe even finish.

    Clicking the cancel button is optimistic at best, especially when it's in one of it's death patterns. It just really seems to do a poor job of operation management in my opinion. When eclipse seems to be "taking forever", chances are it's two operation tasks bouncing back and forth waiting on each other, and not actually slow processing.

    That said, I still love eclipse for Java development. Once you learn the do's and don'ts (and which files to delete when eclipse has a melt down), it's pretty usable.

  28. Eclipse as a platform by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

    It's great.
    There a lot of shitty plugins when used as an IDE, like the Javascript ones that add JS validation and builders to your web projects, bring the IDE to a standstill when every they run.

    1. Re:Eclipse as a platform by IwantToKeepAnon · · Score: 2

      Also : "List_of_Eclipse-based_software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  29. Six of one by msobkow · · Score: 1

    Eclipse is six of one, half a dozen of the other. I've used it for many years, but the Kepler release has decided that it's going to do something Eclipse never did in the past: crash. Hard. As in *poof* -- it's gone.

    It's also been freezing up under Debian at random.

    The windows build seems more stable, and that's what I use for most debug sessions, but I *prefer* to work on my Linux box due to the better resolution and nicer interface devices than my laptop.

    But hey, it's a big project (both Eclipse and my own.) Big projects have bugs. Period. I certainly can't complain about Eclipse, all in all. It does what I need, does it well enough, and integrates with JEE debugging environments. Can't really expect something dealing with that big a pile of steaming code to also be stable.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  30. Re:Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbea by vikingpower · · Score: 1

    Amen. I have been using Forte for Java, then Netbeans. In the mean time ( years, really ) I did one or the other odd project on Eclipse. No comparison in ergonomy and user-friendliness. Netbeans gives you the tools you need in obvious places; in Eclipse, you must either search for the tool, or you have dozens of them lying around when you really need only one. Eclipse = usability hell.

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
  31. Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild by H0p313ss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Have you adjusted the heap memory settings in eclipse.ini?

    Here's the guide I wrote for using the IBM JVM for RSA and RTC, Oracle/JVM settings are similar.

    --
    XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
  32. Declarative eco-system maybe? by bug_hunter · · Score: 1

    Maybe a clumsy choice of words, but I was thinking about the heavy use of annotations, or XML or property files used by many of the popular Java technologies.
    Things are rarely glued together with scripting in the Java ecosystem, somehow it lends itself to complex XML config.
    Eclipse can statically analysis all the XML config (and annotations etc) to show the developer how everything fits together in a more visual and cross referencing way.

    Others in this conversation chain have mentioned how this approach often falls apart under complexity though regardless of how good your tools are.

    --
    It's turtles all the way down.
  33. Re:strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does by Mitchell314 · · Score: 1

    But . . . C++ isn't webscale!

    --
    I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
  34. Eclipse by hackus · · Score: 1

    Well, I love it for just about all my C/Android/Java Servlet programming.

    The only thing I can't really use it for is LINUX kernel programming/device driver development.

    Just too big.

    But I would like to thank everyone who works on the plugins for Eclipse, especially Toad which is one of my favorites and svn plugin.

    Kisses and hugs to you all.

    xoxoxox :-)

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
  35. Personally by ledow · · Score: 2

    Eclipse is my saviour. I needed a UI to program under and I haven't really been happy with one since the pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic (horrendous language, lovely development environment for me - I honestly think we lost something in not taking that UI further in open-source development environments).

    Got back into C99 and Eclipse with CDT was phenomenal. Bit of faffing with the config at first but I was able to get a development environment consistent across platforms, with all the tools you could ever want.

    The debug UI is fabulous, to me. The customisability of the workspace (get out of my damn way and let me code, oh except for that one REALLY useful feature that's earned the right to be there all the time, etc.). In a way, it's my development "Opera" - hugely customisable to my particular odd way of working.

    Plug it into gcc in its various flavours (native Linux, MinGW, Cygwin, etc.) and it's quite happy. Move your program to a Linux VM for testing and you can take the development UI with you if need be.

    Plug in every kind of tool imaginable, including fairly decent versioning management (not its strongest suit but more than capable). Upgrade simply by making a copy of the eclipse folder and then running the upgrade over the top.

    And - at the end of the day - when you have to write that Android wrapper for your program, or the website or online documentation of your masterpiece, you can do without even having to come out of it.

    Eclipse is what got me back into my programming and allowed me to push out several apps for my employers on a whim. None of the other programs managed that.

    And, best of all, it's free and keeps moving onwards. All the people I've heard whinge about Eclipse (which I've only been using since before Galileo) complain about it being heavy/buggy. It's something I've honestly not experienced and, damn, my buggy programming must test it to the limit sometimes. If you're developing on a "light" machine, I can't see how you're helping yourself. But I'm not using a supercomputer here, just a handful of fairly decent laptops / desktops.

    I think Eclipse is a little like Windows. Keep it clean, don't experiment too much with random third-party junk, and make backups of the working config (so easy in Eclipse that I have a folder of every named release that I've ever used just in case I needed to rollback) and it'll stay up and stay working. Mess about with it too much and it'll turn into an unmanaged piece of junk.

    I can't honestly say that I've ever seen it crash, though. And we're talking Windows (XP / 7) / Linux (Slackware and Ubuntu, several versions), desktop / laptop, old clunker and shiny new machine, and quite a lot of stuff plugged in (CDT, Android SDK, several SVN connectors as they've changed over the years, Valgrind, etc.).

  36. code style by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    have they improved default code style, finally?

  37. Re:Java by Xest · · Score: 1

    No, those things are nothing to do with inherent problems with Java, and everything to do with the fact Eclipse is shit.

    There are Java applications that are far more complex and require far higher stability and performance than Eclipse that work just fine. Eclipse is just an exceptionally bad piece of software.

  38. I don't get all the negativity by mooterSkooter · · Score: 2

    It works fine for me. I like the fact I can just copy over the whole eclipes 'install' directory from one computer to another and it just seems to work.

    Same with workspaces, just copy that whole thing over. Works fine.

    I also use a mercurial plugin with it to save my code to bitbucket. Again, works like a dream.

    It's never crashed or slowed down for me (though I rarely update it, because it just works)

    However, I mainly code in C++ with it and have only produced one commercial java/android project with it...that worked fine too.

    In fact, I love it so much that I donated to them recently.

    The only other IDE I think is better in M$ Visual Studio...but that doesn't run on linux and uses shed-loads of disk space, so they can keep it.

    1. Re:I don't get all the negativity by Yosho · · Score: 1

      It works fine for me. I like the fact I can just copy over the whole eclipes 'install' directory from one computer to another and it just seems to work.

      Same with workspaces, just copy that whole thing over. Works fine.

      That's exactly the problem with Eclipse. Sure, you can copy over the whole "install" directory -- but what if you're working on another computer that has Eclipse already installed and you just want to copy over your preferences? What if I want to share my color scheme with another user? What if I want to upgrade to a new version of Eclipse and keep my old preferences?

      What if I want to create a single project file that anybody on my team can open, regardless of where their Eclipse installation or workspace directory is? Heaven forbid we've got a diverse team of people using Windows, OS X, and Linux, and we want to make a project file that will work without any tweaking for everybody on the team.

      The only other IDE I think is better in M$ Visual Studio

      What I'm hearing is that you haven't used a lot of IDEs, because I've always found VS to be awfully lacking in features compared to most other IDEs. Qt Creator for C++ and IntelliJ IDEA for Java are my preferred IDEs nowadays.

      --
      Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
    2. Re:I don't get all the negativity by mooterSkooter · · Score: 1

      Well, I was just talking from personal experience. Like I say, I only used it in a work environment for project where it was only me and another team member working on the same project. It worked great but we were both on windows (though, I did work at home with the same project on linux...again, fine)

      No, I can't say I've used a huge amount of IDEs. I used an IBM one for java about 15 years ago, Powerbuilder I think. It sucked. I've used Visual Studio from about version 5. The changes MS make nowadays are just pointless and are done merely to sell new version, whereas following eclipse for the last few years, it seems to get better.

      I might have to have a look at QT Creator and IntelliJ though...but I like the fact that eclipse compiles for both languages and learning a new interface just seems like time wasted when I could be hacking-away!

  39. Re:Java by lehphyro · · Score: 1

    Eclipse doesn't freeze for years for me and its performance is pretty ok for JavaEE development. I guess people are stuck with this "eclipse is slow" opinion just like some people still think java is slow.

  40. Re:strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does by Rufty · · Score: 1

    It can be.

    --
    Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
  41. Re:strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 1

    Well there is nothing you can do in C++ that you can't do in a turing machine.

  42. Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild by ebno-10db · · Score: 3

    Thank you for that link, as it's probably quite useful.

    However, addressing Eclipse rather than you, I've never used any other IDE that required a user adjustment in heap memory settings. There's something wrong with that.

  43. Say what? by R3d+Jack · · Score: 1

    I use Eclipse all day, every day. It's fast and stable, until certain plug-ins are added. Then, slowdowns happen, mostly because the plug-in is blocking because it is poorly written. As far as CTRL-C not working, I just don't see that. I don't have memory issues, either, as long as I create reasonably large heap, stack, and perm gen.

  44. Which is caused by... by R3d+Jack · · Score: 1

    your anti-virus software. This is a drawback of Java in general, as anti-virus insists on scanning every one of those files in the JAR's.

  45. Re:Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbea by Threni · · Score: 1

    I found Eclipse horrible. IntelliJ or Netbeans both look better, are faster, leaner and just...feel better. So many "solutions" to problems on Eclipse involve uninstalling and reinstalling, or using the "restart" option on the File menu (don't laugh). Why? Why is it recomended you don't uninstall plugins you no longer want to use? Does it have to be that unstable?

  46. Re:Java by ebno-10db · · Score: 1

    Even though I'm often skeptical of Java's performance, I'll play the devil's advocate here and point out that Emacs is written in elisp, which runs on a byte code interpreter and is garbage collected. Despite the jokes, it doesn't have as much stuff as Eclipse, but still it runs fast.

  47. Re:Java by ebno-10db · · Score: 1

    There are Java applications that are far more complex and require far higher stability and performance than Eclipse that work just fine.

    Can you name some "client side" (something you'd run on your PC) pieces of software like that? Serious question - no snark.

  48. Re:Java by ebno-10db · · Score: 1

    I guess people are stuck with this "eclipse is slow" opinion

    It makes sense to be stuck with it when it comes from recent personal observations.

  49. Re:Java by Xest · · Score: 3, Informative

    On the desktop? Minecraft? Azureus? IntelliJ IDEA? OpenOffice? NetBeans? SoapUI?

    If you're looking for substantially more complexity than these sorts of things though then there aren't really any desktop examples that come to mind. It's all server side stuff.

  50. Re:strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does by smaddox · · Score: 1

    Sure there is! You can run out of memory!

  51. Re:Java by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

    You're obviously not familiar with Java then. It's a computer program running inside a virtual machine. The JVM's maximum heap size is set at startup via a command line switch.

  52. Eclipse as a platform by IwantToKeepAnon · · Score: 1

    So far almost all the comments are about Eclipse as an IDE, which may be its biggest application but not the only one. I have used it as a platform for other applications, IBM's scheduler IIRC. It was familiar and the MDI nature (multiple document interface/overlapping child windows) made presenting a lot of information and options easy and accessible. It may not be the easiest to develop components for or the best organization method, but it beats the pants off a poor implementation. I wish those who can't do environments well would stop trying and implement on top of eclipse, at least they'd be consistent.

          http://www.eclipse.org/communi...
          http://wiki.eclipse.org/Rich_C...

    P.S. kudos to eclipse for keeping the hot-keys alive, very usable w/ limited mouse required; a plus in my book.

    --
    "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  53. Re:strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 1

    Touché

  54. And has bloated more every year by whitroth · · Score: 1

    It needed 2G of RAM 5 years ago... and growing. emacs has handed the bloatware crown on.....

                    mark, remembering brief

    1. Re:And has bloated more every year by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I'm trying to remember when emacs was bloated enough to hurt performance. It was small and fast in 2000. It was bigger but still fast in 1990. 1985 was big and slower than the competing editors but still faster than some big do-it-all tools. Really, it was only bloated when you compared it to a basic editor like vi or edt, or if you were on a seriously underpowered computer (don't use emacs on a micro like Amiga or PC-XT, get microemacs instead).

  55. Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild by H0p313ss · · Score: 1

    It's just the way Java works, and Eclipse is all Java. To make it work like any other program just set the min heap size small and the max heap size huge.

    (Smalltalk was the same. Ah Smalltalk, I knew thee well.)

    --
    XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
  56. Re:Java by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    C++ can do it too. Read about HP Project Dynamo.

  57. Re:Java by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    'Modern' coding using Design Patterns I guess. Too much cruft in code like that.

  58. Re:Java by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    So since when did Visual Studio get decent refactoring support out of the box?

  59. Re:Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbea by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Why is it recomended you don't uninstall plugins you no longer want to use? Does it have to be that unstable?

    Dependencies I bet.