Eclipse Foundation Celebrates 10 Years 155
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."
Timeline wrong? (Score:1)
The Eclipse [wikipedia.org] line was phased out by 1989. Heck, Data General wasn't even a company anymore by 2001.
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Welcome to Slashdot, where a joke gets you a -1. Some mod needs another cup of coffee.
Still using it (Score:5, 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.
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Hands down, Eclipse was the slowest and most confusingest I've ever used out of ALL of the above.
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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.
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AUTO 100, 10
Suddenly GW-Basic is rivalling Eclipse as an IDE!
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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...
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Should have used emacs... :-D
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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
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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 understa
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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.
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That makes sense, though it also helps explain Java's slow startup times.
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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-us
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There are multiple versions of Eclipse bundles some which which come with all relevant plugins installed.
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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
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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 y
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Lua is one.
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No it isn't.
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Now it's the new COBOL.
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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.
Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuilder? (Score:2)
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Adobe + Eclipse = Computer Gonorrhea
The only way it could be worse was is Oracle was involved. WAIT! Oracle owns Java.
So it's really:
Adobe + Eclipse + Oracle = Computer AIDS
If you need Flashbuilder, try Mac (Score:2)
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.
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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
Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you adjusted the heap memory settings in eclipse.ini?
Here's the guide I wrote [publicstaticfinal.com] for using the IBM JVM for RSA and RTC, Oracle/JVM settings are similar.
Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild (Score:4)
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.
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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.)
Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbeans (Score:5, 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.)
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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.
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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.
Eclipse (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. Matte
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I suppose you'll be quoting Pink Floyd's "Bitcoin" next...
Try to keep up (Score:2)
Giant contribution (Score:4, 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.
Re: Giant contribution (Score:2)
Uhm, Java IS the standard these days.
Re: Giant contribution (Score:4, 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.
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This. THIS.
I was so happy to ditch Java after 2 years and move to
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what does Eclipse provide java developers which .net cannot?
Source code availability, for one thing. More popular language for another.
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Available outside of Windows as well.
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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.
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Why would IBM buy Java? They roll their own JVM.
Declarative eco-system maybe? (Score:2)
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 oft
For the haters (Score:5, 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.
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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.
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and yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seems to freeze less on CentOs VM than Win7 physic (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 ca
10 years... (Score:5, Funny)
...and I'm still waiting for it to load!
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The modern emacs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The modern emacs (Score:4, Funny)
except you can use emacs to do things
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Edit the code in emacs then let eclipse open it if the boss is watching.
OSGi (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Eclipse as a platform (Score:2)
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.
Six of one (Score:2)
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
Eclipse (Score:2)
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 :-)
Personally (Score:3)
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.).
I don't get all the negativity (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...th
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And has bloated more every year (Score:2)
It needed 2G of RAM 5 years ago... and growing. emacs has handed the bloatware crown on.....
mark, remembering brief
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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).
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Re:Java (Score:5, 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++.
Re:Java (Score:5, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Java (Score:4, 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.
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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.
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'Modern' coding using Design Patterns I guess. Too much cruft in code like that.
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There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++
The JVM is written in C++.
strictly false. C++ DOES everything Java does (Score:1)
> There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++
Quite the opposite. In fact, there nothing Java can do without it doing it in both C and C++. Java is itself DATA, instructions for a C++ program. It's the C++ that does everything. The Java jvm is itself a C++ program (Oracle's version) or a C program (most others).
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Sure there is! You can run out of memory!
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C++ can do it too. Read about HP Project Dynamo.
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No seriously, that wasn't a typo.
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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.
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So since when did Visual Studio get decent refactoring support out of the box?
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memory: did you tweak your heap size in eclipse.ini?
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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.
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Also : "List_of_Eclipse-based_software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]