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back to article Fear and slow loading: Eclipse celebrates 10 unsettling years

In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade? The Reg spoke to Mike …

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  1. dr2chase

    Been using it since 2001 or 2002

    It has gotten large. I still use it, but oof. I did the nonstandard 6GB upgrade to my laptop so that I could run Eclipse and do much of anything else at the same time. (Current project is large mixed Java/Scala; much of the oof is the Scala plugin. I grumble, but I would be even sadder without it.)

    There are some longstanding issues (structural? architectural?) that I think are a result both of its plugin architecture and open source. The UI and properties settings are a maze of twisty passages; there are features I still have not explored (I am sure). The bug reporting stuff has gotten somewhat better (one of the bugs filed is a bit of a rant from me, on how hard it is to extract relevant configuration information from Eclipse when reporting a bug -- alerts where you cannot cut and paste the text, or that disappear before you can read them, that sort of thing -- they also fixed the bug reporting software's workflow/cueing somewhat).

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Does it make that much difference?

      Someone at work managed to blag an extra 2GB (taking them up to 4) and theirs grinds to an unresponsive halt about us much as mine does.

      That said, there was someone who had a 1GB refurb laptop and that was absolutely unusable.

      These are the joys of being a developer, eh? Crap kit while the folk who do excel and word demand the fastest kit.

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      1. dr2chase
        Reply Icon

        Made a huge difference

        Whether it works for you, depends entirely on your project size, I am sure. It's the Micawber principle at work:

        "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

        Adding two gig made the project fit. Another thing that has helped has been de-Flashing the browsers (standard hack on the Mac: delete Flash entirely, install Youtube5 for Safari, and use Chrome with builtin Flash for the stuff that YT5 doesn't handle).

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      2. Ken Hagan Gold badge
        Reply Icon
        Trollface

        Sorry, but I can't really take you seriously if you tolerate an IDE that delivers "unusable" performance levels even with 1GB and requires several more to be acceptable. That's just taking the piss.

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  2. Tom 7

    Thanks for the heads up on Orion.

    That, a few different style sheets, a couple of ajax compiler interfaces and you're coding on the server in any language.

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  3. Monti
    FAIL

    Nothing to do with the article.

    /me failed...

    I wanted to rate the article and accidentally clicked on 1/10. Maybe allow readers to change their rating?

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    yay. 19 years of suck.

    To be fair to cnut in chief Dominic Connor, I would really love him to do an article on Eclipse.

    Hi diatribe on CVs would be as a gentle kiss by a summer breeze compared to what he would write about this steaming mountain of goat cock.

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    1. Ben Holmes
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Down

      Have you used Eclipse? Seriously?

      Whilst it may well be a little difficult to get on with at times (my particular bugbear is opening large Ant build files) it is by no means 'sucky' as you so delicately put it. It has its flaws, just like any IDE does (I'm looking at you, Netbeans), but there is a reason it has such an epic market share.

      Ultimately, it's a good platform which provides the toolsets to get the job done, whatever that may be. If it upsets you that much, don't use it.

      It's that simple.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I love Eclipse

    Every time something new comes along I can plug it in using ANT. A few months later there'll be a full fledged plug in.

    Admittedly it is a bit of a resource hog...

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Interesting, a random "thumbs down" without comment.

    Very mature of you, sir.

    3 statements. Which one is wrong?

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    yay. 10 years of suck.

    To be fair to cnut in chief Dominic Connor, I would really love him to do an article on Eclipse.

    Hi diatribe on CVs would be as a gentle kiss by a summer breeze compared to what he would write about this steaming mountain of goat cock.

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  8. src
    Thumb Up

    New to Eclipse

    I have been introduced to Eclipse very recently when I was asked to write an Android app that communicates with a custom Bluetooth module (with no experience of either of those technologies) in practically no time at all.

    Very impressed with both Eclipse and the ADK. They are both impressive tools that are well documented with plenty of information on common problems a mere Google search away.

    With a fair wind I might even deliver the app on time...

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  9. Andrew Baines Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Ugh

    Eclipse and the equally horrid Net Beans are what keep me working in C# on Visual Studio.

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  10. Baudwalk
    Facepalm

    Eclipse is fine...

    ...as long as I don't have to use the damn thing.

    I've given it a test run from time to time over the years, but could never accept the crippled text editor and the ###CENSORED### configuration system, where I have to go through every colour and indenting setting for every language/file-type I want to edit, rather than having a set of common settings.

    And then only to discover that all that work was stored in the workspace!!! Not as a system- and/or user-wide configuration!!!!!!

    And then, of course, there are some colours that you just can't change...

    I hate it with a passion.

    And now that the Eclipse based Rational Software Architect has been foisted on some of us at work, I'm seriously considering changing jobs just to escape this smelly heap of manure.

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  11. Pinjata
    FAIL

    Not possible to select file using control+tab == epic failure...

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's not research

    Exactly what does running a program released ten years ago have to do with the performance of one of its successors released a couple months ago? It takes a special breed of program NOT to be blazingly fast ten years after its release. Know what the difference between a bloated and slow operating system and the beloved Windows XP is?

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