Open Source Eclipse Celebrates 10th Birthday

msmoriarty writes "10 years ago this month, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers: Eclipse. In an interview with ADTmag.com, Eclipse Foundation director Mike Milinkovich remarks on what was, back then, a revolutionary move: 'You've got to give IBM a lot of credit...Ten years ago, the notion that open source might be the best way for software vendors to collaborate was really a novel idea... Eclipse demonstrated the advantages of collaboration in open source, even amongst fierce competitors.' The Eclipse Foundation is celebrating the anniversary with a kickoff party at its EclipseCon Europe 2011 conference, and if you're an Eclipse community member, the Foundation is also inviting you to add yourself to the Eclipse 10th Birthday Timeline."

Re:Great timing!

[DrXym]

Eclipse gets slower the more plugins you pile on top of it and the larger your workspace. If you stick with a reasonable set of plugins representing what you actually need then it isn't too bad. Startup is about 20 seconds for me on first invoke, and half that thereafter once Windows 7 caches it. 3.7 feels faster compared to older versions too. And once you open it you are likely to leave it open for a long time. So a hit at startup really shouldn't be considered a big deal.

Re:Great timing!

[epine]

The restart speed becomes annoying when you're fighting with wonky plugins and need to make frequent restarts. The worst start speed problem was under XP with anti-virus scanner from hell. I usually have three or four different Eclipse workspaces open on different desktops with a mixture of R and C++ code. Start up isn't much of an issue.

I feel that CDT has lost some momentum lately. It's usable, so it's OK on that front. However, the managed build system is long overdue for a rewrite and I don't see much evidence that this is on the horizon any time soon. Managed build limps along about as well as the C++ indexer prior to its rewrite by CDT Doug. But then he lost religion.

A UI Revolution is Coming. Are we Ready? [blogspot.com]

Actually, no, I'm not ready to drink the Ubuntu Kool-Aid to the power of infinity.

But [Windows 8] confirms for me a trend that's going to change the way we interact with the desktop applications we use daily, including Eclipse. Yes, a UI Revolution is coming. And we need to make sure we're ready, or Eclipse is going to look old very quickly.

I'd feel half my age right now if the Clang/LLVM Eclipse plugin I tried a month ago hadn't made my Eclipse too unstable to use until I removed it again.

It took me a long time to discover a reasonable work flow around Eclipse, mostly because interface discovery is overwhelming at first. But pretty much everything I needed proved to be possible.

Right now the feature causing me the most pain is console management. I have R consoles and R graphic output consoles and Sweave consoles and C++ build consoles and Java error consoles and never the right console on top. The little drop-down doohicky for switching consoles is like having a 5x5 pixel start menu placed at some obscure mid-screen location amid a white-out blizzard of window cruft.

Go ahead, Doug, throw me a new skin and solve all my problems. Make my day without actually fixing anything. I'll be the loudest person cheering if this pans out. It could be that most of my pain radiates from being imprisoned in an unfashionable box. But then, I'm a guy who went directly from MSDOS to Windows NT. The intervening steps were not on my menu. I wanted to move to a real OS, not a lipstick pig of consumer sentiment.

Thinking about this from the higher level, I'm probably not making as much use of custom perspectives as my work flow now requires. It wasn't until adding Sweave documents and installing the newest release of StatET that I really started to drown.