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> Java is slow in intellij. If you're comparing IntelliJ with any other major IDE, that's so incredibly wrong. Very bold of you to claim Eclipse is faster at a

by brabel 4y ago

> Java is slow in intellij. If you're comparing IntelliJ with any other major IDE, that's so incredibly wrong. Very bold of you to claim Eclipse is faster at anything. Everyone was using Eclipse 10 years ago, but it was just such a horrible experience that today the large majority of people are either on IntelliJ or even VSCode! WE didn't move because we liked to learn a new tool with different ways of doing things (IntelliJ used to be even more opinionated back then)... most of the devs I know only moved to IntelliJ reluctantly, forced to by everyone else who had already moved saying how much better, faster, polished it was... and once you moved, you would agree and convert more people because it was, and is, just that good.

closedloop129 4y ago
I still don't understand why Eclipse as an open source project couldn't adapt. Unlike emacs, which is written in elisp, Eclipse is written in Java, the language in which its users are fluent. Why do developers move instead of adapting their IDE?
- _old_dude_ 4y ago
  Funding ! eclipse IDE is in majority maintained by IBM and IBM has decided to allocate less money to Eclipse.
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    That doesn't explain why the community didn't step up much much more and brought the development to new heights. What is holding back Java developers from using their Java language to adapt the IDE written in Java that they daily use? If their boss told them to implement a feature, they would do that. But they don't implement the feature when they need it.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      It's a relative doddle to make changes or write an extension to Emacs or even a Smalltalk system like Pharo. Eclipse, by comparison, is complicated. There's a whole lot of scaffolding and frameworkshit that goes into building an IDE that works the way Eclipse does, and that greatly increases the friction of extending it. Plus Eclipse, like most Java programs, is not really a live system that can be extended and changed as you run it; both Emacs and Smalltalk are. Not being live further increases friction. End users aren't really supposed to extend Eclipse themselves, just download and install prebuilt extensions, and this is accounted for in its design. Visual Studio Code has the same problem. It may be somewhat easier to extend than Eclipse, and it was certainly intended to be so, but doing everything in webshit didn't really address the fundamental issue.
ithrow 4y ago
They are talking specifically about the built-in incremental compiler of the Eclipse IDE, not the whole IDE experience.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I moved to intellij because Eclipse's gradle support was lacking and people seemed to no longer care about fixing it to e.g. run bog standard Spring Boot projects. So yes I did move, and no I don't agree with you on this. And after years of using it, it hasn't gotten much better. Intellij is and was a resource hog. And slow. It's a recurring topic in the Intellij release notes. And it did get better over the years. There are numerous open/unresolved issues in their issue tracker related to all sorts of performance issues. No need for me to file new ones: they know. That's why they keep trying to fix and improve it. But the proper fix is going to require doing what Eclipse did two decades ago, which would be a major architecture change. I don't think they'll ever do that for Java. They might do that for Kotlin though as that is a compiler they've built. Not doing this from day 1 with Kotlin was a design mistake IMHO. But they are working on a more IDE friendly Kotlin compiler. I've actually demonstrated how slow intellij is to people who told me I was crazy. On their own supposedly heavily optimized setups with their own projects. Edit some code, run some test. Eclipse: no delay whatsoever, test start running immediately. Intellij: it takes at least a few seconds before anything happens. That's the best case scenario. Change even one letter in the code and now it "incrementally" compiles, which in Intellij means firing up a gradle process. In Eclipse, the process already runs. It picks up the change immediately and then the single file that you changed is recompiled. It could even do this on broken code. So you could have compile issues in the file and still run a unit test against the non broken parts. Partial and incremental compilation are hard problems to solve. Eclipse had this, Intellij does not. It does some incremental stuff via gradle. But that takes a lot more time. About two orders of magnitude more. Even on a new M1 macbook pro.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Hm, I actually liked eclipse, once I got a bit used to it. At least for a Java project. Mixed feelings about stability sometimes. Mixed feelings about intelliJ's bloat as well.
pjmlp 4y ago
Eclipse is definitely faster than InteliJ on the same hardware. It doesn't start indexing every single project I open, dragging the whole computer to its knees, it does incremental compilation on file save. VSCode support for Java, relies on libraries from Eclipse headless project, so even when using VSCode you're in fact using Eclipse. I am not freely touching InteliJ other than the workflows I am forced to, like Scala plugin or Android.

by brabel 4y ago

closedloop129 4y ago

I still don't understand why Eclipse as an open source project couldn't adapt. Unlike emacs, which is written in elisp, Eclipse is written in Java, the language in which its users are fluent. Why do developers move instead of adapting their IDE?

_old_dude_ 4y ago
Funding ! eclipse IDE is in majority maintained by IBM and IBM has decided to allocate less money to Eclipse.
- closedloop129 4y ago
  That doesn't explain why the community didn't step up much much more and brought the development to new heights. What is holding back Java developers from using their Java language to adapt the IDE written in Java that they daily use? If their boss told them to implement a feature, they would do that. But they don't implement the feature when they need it.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    It's a relative doddle to make changes or write an extension to Emacs or even a Smalltalk system like Pharo. Eclipse, by comparison, is complicated. There's a whole lot of scaffolding and frameworkshit that goes into building an IDE that works the way Eclipse does, and that greatly increases the friction of extending it. Plus Eclipse, like most Java programs, is not really a live system that can be extended and changed as you run it; both Emacs and Smalltalk are. Not being live further increases friction. End users aren't really supposed to extend Eclipse themselves, just download and install prebuilt extensions, and this is accounted for in its design. Visual Studio Code has the same problem. It may be somewhat easier to extend than Eclipse, and it was certainly intended to be so, but doing everything in webshit didn't really address the fundamental issue.

ithrow 4y ago

They are talking specifically about the built-in incremental compiler of the Eclipse IDE, not the whole IDE experience.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I moved to intellij because Eclipse's gradle support was lacking and people seemed to no longer care about fixing it to e.g. run bog standard Spring Boot projects. So yes I did move, and no I don't agree with you on this. And after years of using it, it hasn't gotten much better. Intellij is and was a resource hog. And slow. It's a recurring topic in the Intellij release notes. And it did get better over the years. There are numerous open/unresolved issues in their issue tracker related to all sorts of performance issues. No need for me to file new ones: they know. That's why they keep trying to fix and improve it. But the proper fix is going to require doing what Eclipse did two decades ago, which would be a major architecture change. I don't think they'll ever do that for Java. They might do that for Kotlin though as that is a compiler they've built. Not doing this from day 1 with Kotlin was a design mistake IMHO. But they are working on a more IDE friendly Kotlin compiler. I've actually demonstrated how slow intellij is to people who told me I was crazy. On their own supposedly heavily optimized setups with their own projects. Edit some code, run some test. Eclipse: no delay whatsoever, test start running immediately. Intellij: it takes at least a few seconds before anything happens. That's the best case scenario. Change even one letter in the code and now it "incrementally" compiles, which in Intellij means firing up a gradle process. In Eclipse, the process already runs. It picks up the change immediately and then the single file that you changed is recompiled. It could even do this on broken code. So you could have compile issues in the file and still run a unit test against the non broken parts. Partial and incremental compilation are hard problems to solve. Eclipse had this, Intellij does not. It does some incremental stuff via gradle. But that takes a lot more time. About two orders of magnitude more. Even on a new M1 macbook pro.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Hm, I actually liked eclipse, once I got a bit used to it. At least for a Java project. Mixed feelings about stability sometimes. Mixed feelings about intelliJ's bloat as well.

pjmlp 4y ago

Eclipse is definitely faster than InteliJ on the same hardware. It doesn't start indexing every single project I open, dragging the whole computer to its knees, it does incremental compilation on file save. VSCode support for Java, relies on libraries from Eclipse headless project, so even when using VSCode you're in fact using Eclipse. I am not freely touching InteliJ other than the workflows I am forced to, like Scala plugin or Android.