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People still forget Eclipse when it comes to a full-blown yet not bloated IDE. That thing consumes less than a bare bones VSCode install while running 5x the to

People still forget Eclipse when it comes to a full-blown yet not bloated IDE. That thing consumes less than a bare bones VSCode install while running 5x the tools. It can handle everything from code to git to CI/CD and remote development since 2013. I'm using it for 20 years and I think it's the unsung hero of the IDE world. This article doesn't mention it either as a modern GUI IDE.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
But Eclipse was often laggy and slow. So it felt bloated to the users than VS Code which is snappier even though it is bigger
- bayindirh 3y ago
  It was, for C++, for a couple of years, 12-13 years ago. It's neither laggy nor slow for the last 8-9 years. I've written my Ph.D. thesis on it, on C++, which was a sizeable high performance code. It never crashed, allowed me to work remotely if required, integrated with Valgrind, allowed me to do all my tests, target many configurations at once, without shutting it down even once. Currently it has a great indexer (which is actually an indexer + LSP + static analyzer and more), LSP support if you wish, and tons of features. It gets a stable release every three months, comes with its own optimized JRE if you don't want to install one on your system, etc. Plus, it has configuration snapshots, reproducible configurability, configuration sync and one click config import for migrating/transforming other installs. That thing is a sleeper.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    While Eclipse today is certainly a quite decent IDE, I use it mostly in the form of STM32CubeIDE[1] now, it was servicable at most back in 2005-2006 when I used it for some Java classes. In any case, it's a younger product than the offerings in the article. [1]: https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      > In any case, it's a younger product than the offerings in the article. Yeah, but my gripe was about the closing of the article, which mentioned VSCode. I think the author just doesn't know about it. Eclipse is my DeFacto C++/Python IDE and I'd love to develop a decent Go plugin for it, too. Maybe someday.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    Not just C++. I used to use it for Java development and had the same experiences as the GP too. I’m sure it’s really good these days. But I’ve moved on now and my current workflow works for me, so I don’t see the point in changing it until I run into issues again.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Java never got that slow, but it used to tax the system a lot in the earlier days, yes. I developed Java with Eclipse, but the project I did was not that big when Eclipse was not its prime, and it was in its prime when I was experienced enough to be able to "floor it" in terms of features and project complexity. Now it's just a blip on the memory usage graph when working with big projects, and way way more efficient than the Electron apps which supposed to do 20% of what Eclipse can do.
hnlmorg 3y ago
There’s a reason people don’t talk much about Eclipse these days and it’s because it was a pain to maintain back when it really should have shone. I really wanted to like Eclipse but gave up on it a decade ago because it required constant management from release to release. I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it. I’m sure it’s improved leaps and bounds in that time - 10 years is a heck of a long time in any industry, let alone IT. But I do know I wasn’t the only one who got frustrated with it. So myself and others switched to other solutions and never looked back.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I was there, but it has changed. "Four updates a year" was a great decision to make, to be honest. It just updates now, and I export my installation XML and send to people when they want the exact same IDE I use.
- cxr 3y ago
  > I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it. So basically the same as setting up and configuring a development environment today, except that nowadays it's a lot more centered around the command line and involves a bunch of disparate, half-documented packages/tools from GitHub (and that also inexplicably require 10 to 1000 times more space and clock cycles).
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    The “I” part of IDE stands for “integrated” whereas what you’re describing is just a development environment without any integration into your text editor. That all said, I have found VSC to be piss poor for tempting out new projects. And some ecosystems like TypeScript really do need a lot of boilerplate before you can ever start on a “hello world” application.
lawgimenez 3y ago
I started Android development with Eclipse. That IDE is a beast. People also forgot about Netbeans.
- oogali 3y ago
  Netbeans was my absolute favorite IDE for Java development. After its last release, I honestly felt lost. I’ve gotten back up to speed via IntelliJ but it still doesn’t feel as effortless as it did in Netbeans. And way less care and feeding than Eclipse. Sorry, there’s a lot of “feels” in this post but for me, Netbeans was the one Java IDE that I didn’t have to fight with.
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    Yes Netbeans was very underrated, I used it for making Nokia ME apps. And learning Java.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Still is, quite a few features like Swing editors, or the two way editing between rendering templates and Java code, or the quality of profiling tools for such open source product.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    I also used NetBeans a bit years ago, though that was mainly because it had a (mostly) WYSIWYG editor compared to Eclipse (technically Eclipse had a plugin for that which supposedly was also superior in how it worked - it parsed the code to figure out what the GUI would look like and updated in place instead of NetBeans' generating code with commented out sections you wasn't supposed to touch - but in practice it was both slow and clunky). For Java specifically i felt NetBeans was faster and simpler though i bounced between it and Eclipse because i also used Eclipse for other stuff (C++ mainly) so unless i wanted a GUI i used Eclipse. I did stopped writing Java some time ago though. I did try a recent NetBeans build but i found it much less polished than what i remember from before it became "Apache NetBeans".
  - 3y ago
jbverschoor 3y ago
I love eclipse, but it's unbearable on macos
- bayindirh 3y ago
  How come? I use it regularly. Genuinely asking.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    I don’t know. It’s even worse with IntelliJ. IntelliJ crashes regularly. It unbearable. Running m1 sonoma
    - perrylaj 3y ago
      Interesting - I run Intellij Ultimate on Macbooks (both Intel and m2) and never have a crash. Infrequently run into bugs when upgrading the ide or 3rd party plugins; that requires some sort of cache invalidation or project reimport (couple times a year), but it's pretty smooth sailing for something I use across many different projects and languages. Java, kotlin, TS, python, groovy, shell scripting, json/xml/yaml/html/tsx are all generally touched 40+ hours on a weekly basis - it just works. I do agree intellij is memory hungry with multiple projects open and a variety of languages involved, but RAM is cheap enough (and VMs/Docker/K8s hungry enough) that I just don't buy a machine with less than 32GB anyway, so I give intellij up to 6 GB and never give it another thought. I don't do much android development, but do find Android Studio to feel clunky and slow at times, guessing because of the heavy integration with Android dependencies and emulation, but not really something I know enough about to comment with any sense of authority.
- hugi 3y ago
  How so? Use it daily, with hundreds of open projects and it just flies.
jmyeet 3y ago
VSCode is really a text editor-in-IDE-clothing. Also, it's an Electron app and those are notoriously resource heavy. ~20 years ago I became an early IntelliJ user. From version 3 maybe? It's hard to recall. I've never looked back. But I did try Eclipse and... I never got the appeal. For one, the whole "perspectives" thing never gelled with me. I don't want my UI completely changing because now I'm debugging. This is really part of a larger discussion about modal editors (eg vim vs emacs). A lot of people, myself included, do not like modal editors. But the big issue for Eclipse always was plugins. The term "plugin hell" has been associated with Eclipse for as long as I can recall. Even back in the Subversion days I seem to recall there were 2 major plugins (Subclipse? and another?) that did this and neither was "complete" or fully working. To me, IntelliJ was just substantially better from day one and I never had to mess around with plugins. I don't like debugging and maintaining my editor, which is a big reason why I never got big into vim or eclipse. I feel like some people enjoy this tinkering and completely underestimate how much time they spend on this.
- verelo 3y ago
  I’ve been using vscode for a few years now and while i find its search amazing, it doesn’t do much more for me. Its syntax highlighting is good, but the auto complete recommendations have been driving me insane recently. Writing rails api with a nextjs ui, anyone got any suggestions on alternative paths i should take?
  - victorbojica 3y ago
    JetBrains solutions. It think it's called RubyMine.
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    This may not apply to you but I find it so weird how many programmers won't invest even a modest amount into software they'll use 8 hours a day every day. Particularly when we'll so easily spend money to upgrade RAM or buy a new PC. RubyMine on a cancel anytime personal license is $22.90/month (or $229 for a year). That's nothing. I'd say just try it. If you don't like it, you might only be out $23. I'm not a Ruby person so can't comment on that really. For Java (and C++) it's a lifesaver. Things like moving a file to a different directory and it'll update all your packages and imports. Same with just renaming a class or even a method. The deep syntactic understanding Jetbrains IDE have of the code base is one of the big reasons I use them.
indymike 3y ago
For about five years, my daily start of the day ritual was starting eclipse, going to a 10 minute standup, and coming back two minutes before it stopped loading. To be fair, it's probably better now, and I stopped doing Java work in 2014.
- gosub100 3y ago
  what I dont understand about java is why doesn't it just take what it needs? If I commanded eclipse to open, that's it. Open an editor, maybe 2-3 recent files, and let me move the cursor around. If IntelliJ isn't ready yet, so be it, but dont slow my UX down because it's running a bunch of services I didn't ask for. If I hit the IntelliJ autocomplete then fine, I'll wait if it's not ready, but until then, the editor frames should be just as snappy as notepad. Java doesn't put the user first!
  - hinkley 3y ago
    One of the biggest tricks with Java IDEs was not giving them more memory, but giving them more initial memory. Tuning startup heap size could cut upward of 40% off of startup and settling time.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Anyone who thinks Eclipse is compact is hallucinating.
badsectoracula 3y ago
I used to like Eclipse but honestly it was and still is a hog. At the time i used it in the late 2000s it was basically the best IDE for C++, having features that Visual C++ users either did not have or needed to pay extra for plugin to get. I used it at work then when everyone else used Visual C++. However at home i had a computer i bought late 2003 (which was a high end PC at the time but still) and the program was so heavy i remember despite running it under a lightweight environment (just X with Window Maker) i had to choose between Firefox and Eclipse because otherwise things would crawl due to the excessive memory use both programs made :-P. Eventually i switched to other IDEs and forgot about Eclipse. But i did try it recently again and while obviously doesn't feel as heavyweight as it did back then (i'm running it on a 8 core machine with 32GB of RAM so it better be), it still feels sluggish and startup time is still quite slow. Also TBH i never liked the idea behind workspaces. These days i don't write C++ much but when i do i use either QtCreator or Kate with the Clangd LSP (which i also use for C).
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I think 9 seconds startup time with 1GB of memory use is pretty acceptable for an IDE at the size of Eclipse (just timed). Considering I'm not closing it down for whole day when I'm using it, waiting for ~10 seconds in the morning is not that bad. In 2003, Eclipse was at its infancy and was an absolute hog, I agree on that front. Actually you are not expected to have "n" workspaces. Maybe a couple (personal and office) at most. Project relationships and grouping is handled via "referenced projects". Kate is an awesome code-aware text editor. I generally write small Go programs with that, but if something gonna be a proper project, it's always developed on Eclipse.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > Considering I'm not closing it down for whole day when I'm using it, waiting for ~10 seconds in the morning is not that bad. I tend to close and run the IDEs (and most programs) multiple times per day - a clean desktop kinda lets me clean/reset my thoughts - so long startup times are annoying. Of course i wouldn't avoid a program if it was responsive, fast and did what i wanted after it started up. > Actually you are not expected to have "n" workspaces. Maybe a couple (personal and office) at most. Project relationships and grouping is handled via "referenced projects". Yeah i also had a single workspace but i worked in a bunch of other things, including some Java stuff in NetBeans and i want to have everything in one place. I do use and prefer IDEs but every other IDE could just store projects wherever i wanted.
ben_w 3y ago
I have good memories of Eclipse, from back when I was doing Java. I remember at the time it seemed everyone dissed it, much as it feels like everyone disses Jira now and for the last decade, but I liked it.
fredgrott 3y ago
I think you are mistaken, Eclipse takes up 3 times the ram VSCode does...I can use VSCode using only 6gig ram even with big projects with native code such as kotlin, java, c, swift, etc..Eclipse will not run on 6 gig ram neither will jetbrains or android studio.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  My system monitor says it's using 1.3GBs after warming up, and even forcefully reindexing a big C++ project. I don't think VSCode will use 400MBs with that amount of code, plus electron, plus all the LSP stuff you run beneath it. In that state Eclipse will fit into a 6GB system just fine. I'd love to try that at a VM right now, but I don't have the time, unfortunately :)
- hinkley 3y ago
  If memory serves, fully loaded Eclipse would take about 20-25% more memory than IntelliJ, which was itself rightfully called greedy. At the time most of us felt it was worth the cost of entry for all of the tools you got, which eclipse had a subset of.
jen20 3y ago
A blast from the past there. I used Eclipse for Java in its infancy while I was at university and thought it was decent enough compared to whatever version on emacs would have been on whatever version of Solaris was on my CS department servers. A couple of years later I started an internship at a bank and spent ~3 hours trying to get a project building before someone introduced me to IntelliJ, which I still use every day almost 20 years later!
felipemnoa 3y ago
There does seem to be a lot of hate for eclipse. The complaint I always hear is that it is a pain to use. Personally I’ve always liked it, even though I’ve used the other popular IDEs.
- hugi 3y ago
  Agreed. And there's simply nothing that comes close to the power of the workspace when working on multiple projects that share dependencies.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    The original idea was to replicate the Smalltalk image approach, but backed by a virtual filesystem instead. Eclipse is Visual Age for Smalltalk reborn, after all. It was common to have plugins corrupt its metada, but somehow it finally became quite stable.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Same here. You will find old rants from me complaining about workspaces metadata, but that problem has been sorted for quite sometime now.
flohofwoe 3y ago
Sorry, but "not bloated" really doesn't enter my mind when I think of Eclipse. The few times I used it for Java programming, it took forever to start up, and the UI was laggy as hell during regular use. Granted, that was about 10 years ago, but on a (at the time) beefy Windows PC.
jmmv 3y ago
I (author) wouldn’t say I “forgot” about it. I was there when Eclipse became a thing, and my memories are all pretty grim. Difficult to use, slow, very resource hungry… so I never really paid much attention once I finished school. It probably is better now as others are saying, but I don’t know nor care at this point to be honest.
nunez 3y ago
Ha. I mostly used Eclipse in college. I learned how to compile programs from the Command Prompt (Windows user back then) primarily to avoid Eclipse LOL. It was dog slow and somewhat difficult to navigate
agumonkey 3y ago
Interesting. I hate Eclipse with a passion, I find the ergonomics so horrendous, and back in the days it was a hog. Maybe on today's hardware it's leaner than webkit based vscode. But the last time I tried to use git with it .. it made things 10x harder than the CLI. It was so bad that I developped RSI in 24h (and I'm a daily emacs user)
- hinkley 3y ago
  It’s possible that Eclipse has had a “Firefox moment” where someone carved it down to a lighter core, but I’ve no reason to check. Seconded on the ergonomics. They were a joke. Longest inputs of any IDE I’ve ever used. If your sequences are longer than vim you need to get your head examined.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    eclipse was a child of the java components era, even a trimmed down eclipse would still have tons of baggage i really despised (to stay polite) everything about eclipse/java culture.. lots of generic layouts and components, nothing i cared about or bringing me dense information about code. way too much chrome and perspectives and what not. it was a cultural dead end, the people who "enjoy" working this way are on a different axis from me.. give me emacs+magit where things are right under your fingers and easy to extend.. and people using this kind of tools (i'm sure vim/neovim crowd likes that too even more) produce more tools of that kind
elric 3y ago
I still love Eclipse, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands. The last couple of years, however, it feels like Eclipse is actively getting worse. And I don't mean that it's lacking features. I mean that every new release seems to break something else. I tried reporting some bugs, but that required signing some kind of soul-selling agreement with the Eclipse Foundation or some other nonsense. I then tried fixing those bugs, but there is no up to date documentation on how to build the IDE from the myriad of repositories and modules. So I gave up.
layer8 3y ago
I’ll raise you NetBeans to that.
olejorgenb 3y ago
Eclips also had (have?) The very interesting mylyn plug-in which narrows down the code to the context your working within. Think collapsing everything in eg the project tree and also functions within files. This context is built up based on what part of the code you work on.
whalesalad 3y ago
Eclipse is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the most bloated and stodgy IDE on the earth.
thiht 3y ago
> People still forget Eclipse thank god
icedchai 3y ago
My experience with Eclipse, about 10 to 15 years ago, was the exact opposite. It was incredibly bloated. With some combination of plugins installed, it became unusable. At a previous company, we were using some sort of Scala plugin, and Eclipse couldn't even keep up with my typing! I moved on to IntelliJ around that time.
- hinkley 3y ago
  All of the JetBrains users sitting around comparing notes, trying to figure out what was wrong with our coworkers that they thought eclipse was worth using, let alone defending. JetBrains has plenty of problems, which they seem to want to address but I fear Fleet won’t fix, and I lament but understand people wanting something lighter these days, but eclipse isn’t even in that conversation.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Additionally, I always felt the whole Eclipse "user experience" was terrible. Setting up a project was a mess. The default layout left a tiny window for code. The default fonts were bad. I could go on.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      "It's only free if your time is worthless."
stjohnswarts 3y ago
I should fire it up, I haven't tried it in a while. It was the only thing I could use that seem to accurately (more or less) index large projects that you, uh, had some issues compiling and just want to navigate around and look through the code. now I mostly just use rg for big projects, inside of neovim
StevePerkins 3y ago
Honestly, I feel like the primary reason why IntelliJ "won" over Eclipse and Netbeans was that it was first to market with a decent-looking dark mode. Back when Eclipse and Netbeans were as stark white as Windows Notepad... and caught with their pants down as developers abruptly decided en masse that white backgrounds were over, and every app needed to be dark mode first. Hell, Eclipse STILL doesn't really have a nice dark mode. The actual editor view looks okay, but the dark mode feels very bolted-on to the surrounding UI. I think this is the primary reason why VSCode is eating the world today. People will talk about the plugin ecosystem and all these other community inertia advantages. However, VSCode was exploding in popularity BEFORE that plugin ecosystem was in place! If we're really honest with ourselves, we flocked to because it was even more gorgeous looking than Sublime Edit, and without the nag modal to pay someone 70-something dollars. Appearances MATTER.
- pico303 3y ago
  JetBrains “won” because of code inspection tools and code completion that was light years ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans. I remember in my Java days I used to be able to do in a keystroke what my Eclipse friends did in a dozen dialogs.
  - StevePerkins 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but my anecdotal experience from working with peers is that the overwhelming majority of IntelliJ users never learn a small fraction of the keyboard shortcuts and advanced tooling. I really do believe that for most people, IntelliJ is basically a VSCode that: (1) has a better debugger and some more polish around Maven/Gradle integration, and (2) came out 10+ years sooner. But ~10 years ago, everyone I knew was flocking over because IntelliJ felt less slow and bloated than Eclipse, and its dark mode UI was more attractive in comparison. Then it became the more-or-less official way to develop Android apps (back when Android's U.S. market share was a lot higher), and that was all she wrote.
- zestyping 3y ago
  No, dark mode is a red herring. I used IntelliJ because it had better functionality and wasn't incredibly slow (only somewhat slow). User experience matters. Most of user experience has nothing to do with dark mode. Dark mode is pure fashion, and should be prioritized appropriately.
zestyping 3y ago
I'm shocked to hear you describe it as "not bloated". Eclipse took many seconds to start up, responded slowly to typing, and used huge amounts of memory. It was by far the slowest of any application I had used. I used it when I had to, but never got comfortable with it because it was just way too slow.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
Eclipse... not bloated. I can't say I understand those words in that order. I used it for quite awhile until JetBrains stole my heart, but it was nothing if not bloated, even then.
vidarh 3y ago
Eclipse used to be my reference for most-horribly-bloated-IDE.... It's bizarre to now see it described this way.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

But Eclipse was often laggy and slow. So it felt bloated to the users than VS Code which is snappier even though it is bigger

bayindirh 3y ago
It was, for C++, for a couple of years, 12-13 years ago. It's neither laggy nor slow for the last 8-9 years. I've written my Ph.D. thesis on it, on C++, which was a sizeable high performance code. It never crashed, allowed me to work remotely if required, integrated with Valgrind, allowed me to do all my tests, target many configurations at once, without shutting it down even once. Currently it has a great indexer (which is actually an indexer + LSP + static analyzer and more), LSP support if you wish, and tons of features. It gets a stable release every three months, comes with its own optimized JRE if you don't want to install one on your system, etc. Plus, it has configuration snapshots, reproducible configurability, configuration sync and one click config import for migrating/transforming other installs. That thing is a sleeper.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  While Eclipse today is certainly a quite decent IDE, I use it mostly in the form of STM32CubeIDE[1] now, it was servicable at most back in 2005-2006 when I used it for some Java classes. In any case, it's a younger product than the offerings in the article. [1]: https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    > In any case, it's a younger product than the offerings in the article. Yeah, but my gripe was about the closing of the article, which mentioned VSCode. I think the author just doesn't know about it. Eclipse is my DeFacto C++/Python IDE and I'd love to develop a decent Go plugin for it, too. Maybe someday.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  Not just C++. I used to use it for Java development and had the same experiences as the GP too. I’m sure it’s really good these days. But I’ve moved on now and my current workflow works for me, so I don’t see the point in changing it until I run into issues again.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Java never got that slow, but it used to tax the system a lot in the earlier days, yes. I developed Java with Eclipse, but the project I did was not that big when Eclipse was not its prime, and it was in its prime when I was experienced enough to be able to "floor it" in terms of features and project complexity. Now it's just a blip on the memory usage graph when working with big projects, and way way more efficient than the Electron apps which supposed to do 20% of what Eclipse can do.

hnlmorg 3y ago

There’s a reason people don’t talk much about Eclipse these days and it’s because it was a pain to maintain back when it really should have shone. I really wanted to like Eclipse but gave up on it a decade ago because it required constant management from release to release. I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it. I’m sure it’s improved leaps and bounds in that time - 10 years is a heck of a long time in any industry, let alone IT. But I do know I wasn’t the only one who got frustrated with it. So myself and others switched to other solutions and never looked back.

bayindirh 3y ago
I was there, but it has changed. "Four updates a year" was a great decision to make, to be honest. It just updates now, and I export my installation XML and send to people when they want the exact same IDE I use.
cxr 3y ago
> I remember one job I had where I didn’t need an IDE all that often and I would spend nearly as much time configuring Eclipse again upon the next time I came to use it, as I was spending time writing code in it. So basically the same as setting up and configuring a development environment today, except that nowadays it's a lot more centered around the command line and involves a bunch of disparate, half-documented packages/tools from GitHub (and that also inexplicably require 10 to 1000 times more space and clock cycles).
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  The “I” part of IDE stands for “integrated” whereas what you’re describing is just a development environment without any integration into your text editor. That all said, I have found VSC to be piss poor for tempting out new projects. And some ecosystems like TypeScript really do need a lot of boilerplate before you can ever start on a “hello world” application.

lawgimenez 3y ago

I started Android development with Eclipse. That IDE is a beast. People also forgot about Netbeans.

oogali 3y ago
Netbeans was my absolute favorite IDE for Java development. After its last release, I honestly felt lost. I’ve gotten back up to speed via IntelliJ but it still doesn’t feel as effortless as it did in Netbeans. And way less care and feeding than Eclipse. Sorry, there’s a lot of “feels” in this post but for me, Netbeans was the one Java IDE that I didn’t have to fight with.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  Yes Netbeans was very underrated, I used it for making Nokia ME apps. And learning Java.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Still is, quite a few features like Swing editors, or the two way editing between rendering templates and Java code, or the quality of profiling tools for such open source product.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  I also used NetBeans a bit years ago, though that was mainly because it had a (mostly) WYSIWYG editor compared to Eclipse (technically Eclipse had a plugin for that which supposedly was also superior in how it worked - it parsed the code to figure out what the GUI would look like and updated in place instead of NetBeans' generating code with commented out sections you wasn't supposed to touch - but in practice it was both slow and clunky). For Java specifically i felt NetBeans was faster and simpler though i bounced between it and Eclipse because i also used Eclipse for other stuff (C++ mainly) so unless i wanted a GUI i used Eclipse. I did stopped writing Java some time ago though. I did try a recent NetBeans build but i found it much less polished than what i remember from before it became "Apache NetBeans".
- 3y ago

jbverschoor 3y ago

I love eclipse, but it's unbearable on macos

bayindirh 3y ago
How come? I use it regularly. Genuinely asking.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  I don’t know. It’s even worse with IntelliJ. IntelliJ crashes regularly. It unbearable. Running m1 sonoma
  - perrylaj 3y ago
    Interesting - I run Intellij Ultimate on Macbooks (both Intel and m2) and never have a crash. Infrequently run into bugs when upgrading the ide or 3rd party plugins; that requires some sort of cache invalidation or project reimport (couple times a year), but it's pretty smooth sailing for something I use across many different projects and languages. Java, kotlin, TS, python, groovy, shell scripting, json/xml/yaml/html/tsx are all generally touched 40+ hours on a weekly basis - it just works. I do agree intellij is memory hungry with multiple projects open and a variety of languages involved, but RAM is cheap enough (and VMs/Docker/K8s hungry enough) that I just don't buy a machine with less than 32GB anyway, so I give intellij up to 6 GB and never give it another thought. I don't do much android development, but do find Android Studio to feel clunky and slow at times, guessing because of the heavy integration with Android dependencies and emulation, but not really something I know enough about to comment with any sense of authority.
hugi 3y ago
How so? Use it daily, with hundreds of open projects and it just flies.

jmyeet 3y ago

VSCode is really a text editor-in-IDE-clothing. Also, it's an Electron app and those are notoriously resource heavy. ~20 years ago I became an early IntelliJ user. From version 3 maybe? It's hard to recall. I've never looked back. But I did try Eclipse and... I never got the appeal. For one, the whole "perspectives" thing never gelled with me. I don't want my UI completely changing because now I'm debugging. This is really part of a larger discussion about modal editors (eg vim vs emacs). A lot of people, myself included, do not like modal editors. But the big issue for Eclipse always was plugins. The term "plugin hell" has been associated with Eclipse for as long as I can recall. Even back in the Subversion days I seem to recall there were 2 major plugins (Subclipse? and another?) that did this and neither was "complete" or fully working. To me, IntelliJ was just substantially better from day one and I never had to mess around with plugins. I don't like debugging and maintaining my editor, which is a big reason why I never got big into vim or eclipse. I feel like some people enjoy this tinkering and completely underestimate how much time they spend on this.

verelo 3y ago
I’ve been using vscode for a few years now and while i find its search amazing, it doesn’t do much more for me. Its syntax highlighting is good, but the auto complete recommendations have been driving me insane recently. Writing rails api with a nextjs ui, anyone got any suggestions on alternative paths i should take?
- victorbojica 3y ago
  JetBrains solutions. It think it's called RubyMine.
- jmyeet 3y ago
  This may not apply to you but I find it so weird how many programmers won't invest even a modest amount into software they'll use 8 hours a day every day. Particularly when we'll so easily spend money to upgrade RAM or buy a new PC. RubyMine on a cancel anytime personal license is $22.90/month (or $229 for a year). That's nothing. I'd say just try it. If you don't like it, you might only be out $23. I'm not a Ruby person so can't comment on that really. For Java (and C++) it's a lifesaver. Things like moving a file to a different directory and it'll update all your packages and imports. Same with just renaming a class or even a method. The deep syntactic understanding Jetbrains IDE have of the code base is one of the big reasons I use them.

indymike 3y ago

For about five years, my daily start of the day ritual was starting eclipse, going to a 10 minute standup, and coming back two minutes before it stopped loading. To be fair, it's probably better now, and I stopped doing Java work in 2014.

gosub100 3y ago
what I dont understand about java is why doesn't it just take what it needs? If I commanded eclipse to open, that's it. Open an editor, maybe 2-3 recent files, and let me move the cursor around. If IntelliJ isn't ready yet, so be it, but dont slow my UX down because it's running a bunch of services I didn't ask for. If I hit the IntelliJ autocomplete then fine, I'll wait if it's not ready, but until then, the editor frames should be just as snappy as notepad. Java doesn't put the user first!
- hinkley 3y ago
  One of the biggest tricks with Java IDEs was not giving them more memory, but giving them more initial memory. Tuning startup heap size could cut upward of 40% off of startup and settling time.
hinkley 3y ago
Anyone who thinks Eclipse is compact is hallucinating.

badsectoracula 3y ago

I used to like Eclipse but honestly it was and still is a hog. At the time i used it in the late 2000s it was basically the best IDE for C++, having features that Visual C++ users either did not have or needed to pay extra for plugin to get. I used it at work then when everyone else used Visual C++. However at home i had a computer i bought late 2003 (which was a high end PC at the time but still) and the program was so heavy i remember despite running it under a lightweight environment (just X with Window Maker) i had to choose between Firefox and Eclipse because otherwise things would crawl due to the excessive memory use both programs made :-P. Eventually i switched to other IDEs and forgot about Eclipse. But i did try it recently again and while obviously doesn't feel as heavyweight as it did back then (i'm running it on a 8 core machine with 32GB of RAM so it better be), it still feels sluggish and startup time is still quite slow. Also TBH i never liked the idea behind workspaces. These days i don't write C++ much but when i do i use either QtCreator or Kate with the Clangd LSP (which i also use for C).

bayindirh 3y ago
I think 9 seconds startup time with 1GB of memory use is pretty acceptable for an IDE at the size of Eclipse (just timed). Considering I'm not closing it down for whole day when I'm using it, waiting for ~10 seconds in the morning is not that bad. In 2003, Eclipse was at its infancy and was an absolute hog, I agree on that front. Actually you are not expected to have "n" workspaces. Maybe a couple (personal and office) at most. Project relationships and grouping is handled via "referenced projects". Kate is an awesome code-aware text editor. I generally write small Go programs with that, but if something gonna be a proper project, it's always developed on Eclipse.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > Considering I'm not closing it down for whole day when I'm using it, waiting for ~10 seconds in the morning is not that bad. I tend to close and run the IDEs (and most programs) multiple times per day - a clean desktop kinda lets me clean/reset my thoughts - so long startup times are annoying. Of course i wouldn't avoid a program if it was responsive, fast and did what i wanted after it started up. > Actually you are not expected to have "n" workspaces. Maybe a couple (personal and office) at most. Project relationships and grouping is handled via "referenced projects". Yeah i also had a single workspace but i worked in a bunch of other things, including some Java stuff in NetBeans and i want to have everything in one place. I do use and prefer IDEs but every other IDE could just store projects wherever i wanted.

ben_w 3y ago

I have good memories of Eclipse, from back when I was doing Java. I remember at the time it seemed everyone dissed it, much as it feels like everyone disses Jira now and for the last decade, but I liked it.

fredgrott 3y ago

I think you are mistaken, Eclipse takes up 3 times the ram VSCode does...I can use VSCode using only 6gig ram even with big projects with native code such as kotlin, java, c, swift, etc..Eclipse will not run on 6 gig ram neither will jetbrains or android studio.

bayindirh 3y ago
My system monitor says it's using 1.3GBs after warming up, and even forcefully reindexing a big C++ project. I don't think VSCode will use 400MBs with that amount of code, plus electron, plus all the LSP stuff you run beneath it. In that state Eclipse will fit into a 6GB system just fine. I'd love to try that at a VM right now, but I don't have the time, unfortunately :)
hinkley 3y ago
If memory serves, fully loaded Eclipse would take about 20-25% more memory than IntelliJ, which was itself rightfully called greedy. At the time most of us felt it was worth the cost of entry for all of the tools you got, which eclipse had a subset of.

jen20 3y ago

A blast from the past there. I used Eclipse for Java in its infancy while I was at university and thought it was decent enough compared to whatever version on emacs would have been on whatever version of Solaris was on my CS department servers. A couple of years later I started an internship at a bank and spent ~3 hours trying to get a project building before someone introduced me to IntelliJ, which I still use every day almost 20 years later!

felipemnoa 3y ago

There does seem to be a lot of hate for eclipse. The complaint I always hear is that it is a pain to use. Personally I’ve always liked it, even though I’ve used the other popular IDEs.

hugi 3y ago
Agreed. And there's simply nothing that comes close to the power of the workspace when working on multiple projects that share dependencies.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  The original idea was to replicate the Smalltalk image approach, but backed by a virtual filesystem instead. Eclipse is Visual Age for Smalltalk reborn, after all. It was common to have plugins corrupt its metada, but somehow it finally became quite stable.
pjmlp 3y ago
Same here. You will find old rants from me complaining about workspaces metadata, but that problem has been sorted for quite sometime now.

flohofwoe 3y ago

Sorry, but "not bloated" really doesn't enter my mind when I think of Eclipse. The few times I used it for Java programming, it took forever to start up, and the UI was laggy as hell during regular use. Granted, that was about 10 years ago, but on a (at the time) beefy Windows PC.

jmmv 3y ago

I (author) wouldn’t say I “forgot” about it. I was there when Eclipse became a thing, and my memories are all pretty grim. Difficult to use, slow, very resource hungry… so I never really paid much attention once I finished school. It probably is better now as others are saying, but I don’t know nor care at this point to be honest.

nunez 3y ago

Ha. I mostly used Eclipse in college. I learned how to compile programs from the Command Prompt (Windows user back then) primarily to avoid Eclipse LOL. It was dog slow and somewhat difficult to navigate

agumonkey 3y ago

Interesting. I hate Eclipse with a passion, I find the ergonomics so horrendous, and back in the days it was a hog. Maybe on today's hardware it's leaner than webkit based vscode. But the last time I tried to use git with it .. it made things 10x harder than the CLI. It was so bad that I developped RSI in 24h (and I'm a daily emacs user)

hinkley 3y ago
It’s possible that Eclipse has had a “Firefox moment” where someone carved it down to a lighter core, but I’ve no reason to check. Seconded on the ergonomics. They were a joke. Longest inputs of any IDE I’ve ever used. If your sequences are longer than vim you need to get your head examined.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  eclipse was a child of the java components era, even a trimmed down eclipse would still have tons of baggage i really despised (to stay polite) everything about eclipse/java culture.. lots of generic layouts and components, nothing i cared about or bringing me dense information about code. way too much chrome and perspectives and what not. it was a cultural dead end, the people who "enjoy" working this way are on a different axis from me.. give me emacs+magit where things are right under your fingers and easy to extend.. and people using this kind of tools (i'm sure vim/neovim crowd likes that too even more) produce more tools of that kind

elric 3y ago

I still love Eclipse, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands. The last couple of years, however, it feels like Eclipse is actively getting worse. And I don't mean that it's lacking features. I mean that every new release seems to break something else. I tried reporting some bugs, but that required signing some kind of soul-selling agreement with the Eclipse Foundation or some other nonsense. I then tried fixing those bugs, but there is no up to date documentation on how to build the IDE from the myriad of repositories and modules. So I gave up.

layer8 3y ago

I’ll raise you NetBeans to that.

olejorgenb 3y ago

Eclips also had (have?) The very interesting mylyn plug-in which narrows down the code to the context your working within. Think collapsing everything in eg the project tree and also functions within files. This context is built up based on what part of the code you work on.

whalesalad 3y ago

Eclipse is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the most bloated and stodgy IDE on the earth.

thiht 3y ago

> People still forget Eclipse thank god

icedchai 3y ago

My experience with Eclipse, about 10 to 15 years ago, was the exact opposite. It was incredibly bloated. With some combination of plugins installed, it became unusable. At a previous company, we were using some sort of Scala plugin, and Eclipse couldn't even keep up with my typing! I moved on to IntelliJ around that time.

hinkley 3y ago
All of the JetBrains users sitting around comparing notes, trying to figure out what was wrong with our coworkers that they thought eclipse was worth using, let alone defending. JetBrains has plenty of problems, which they seem to want to address but I fear Fleet won’t fix, and I lament but understand people wanting something lighter these days, but eclipse isn’t even in that conversation.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Additionally, I always felt the whole Eclipse "user experience" was terrible. Setting up a project was a mess. The default layout left a tiny window for code. The default fonts were bad. I could go on.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    "It's only free if your time is worthless."

stjohnswarts 3y ago

I should fire it up, I haven't tried it in a while. It was the only thing I could use that seem to accurately (more or less) index large projects that you, uh, had some issues compiling and just want to navigate around and look through the code. now I mostly just use rg for big projects, inside of neovim

StevePerkins 3y ago

Honestly, I feel like the primary reason why IntelliJ "won" over Eclipse and Netbeans was that it was first to market with a decent-looking dark mode. Back when Eclipse and Netbeans were as stark white as Windows Notepad... and caught with their pants down as developers abruptly decided en masse that white backgrounds were over, and every app needed to be dark mode first. Hell, Eclipse STILL doesn't really have a nice dark mode. The actual editor view looks okay, but the dark mode feels very bolted-on to the surrounding UI. I think this is the primary reason why VSCode is eating the world today. People will talk about the plugin ecosystem and all these other community inertia advantages. However, VSCode was exploding in popularity BEFORE that plugin ecosystem was in place! If we're really honest with ourselves, we flocked to because it was even more gorgeous looking than Sublime Edit, and without the nag modal to pay someone 70-something dollars. Appearances MATTER.

pico303 3y ago
JetBrains “won” because of code inspection tools and code completion that was light years ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans. I remember in my Java days I used to be able to do in a keystroke what my Eclipse friends did in a dozen dialogs.
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but my anecdotal experience from working with peers is that the overwhelming majority of IntelliJ users never learn a small fraction of the keyboard shortcuts and advanced tooling. I really do believe that for most people, IntelliJ is basically a VSCode that: (1) has a better debugger and some more polish around Maven/Gradle integration, and (2) came out 10+ years sooner. But ~10 years ago, everyone I knew was flocking over because IntelliJ felt less slow and bloated than Eclipse, and its dark mode UI was more attractive in comparison. Then it became the more-or-less official way to develop Android apps (back when Android's U.S. market share was a lot higher), and that was all she wrote.
zestyping 3y ago
No, dark mode is a red herring. I used IntelliJ because it had better functionality and wasn't incredibly slow (only somewhat slow). User experience matters. Most of user experience has nothing to do with dark mode. Dark mode is pure fashion, and should be prioritized appropriately.

zestyping 3y ago

I'm shocked to hear you describe it as "not bloated". Eclipse took many seconds to start up, responded slowly to typing, and used huge amounts of memory. It was by far the slowest of any application I had used. I used it when I had to, but never got comfortable with it because it was just way too slow.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

Eclipse... not bloated. I can't say I understand those words in that order. I used it for quite awhile until JetBrains stole my heart, but it was nothing if not bloated, even then.

vidarh 3y ago

Eclipse used to be my reference for most-horribly-bloated-IDE.... It's bizarre to now see it described this way.