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Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? Granted I last used it about 20 ye

Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? Granted I last used it about 20 years ago, but it was a less than positive experience.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I once used eclipse c development tools to hack frogcomposband to my whim and desire, it was a decent experience for "free"
- InfiniteRand 2y ago
  Eclipse is reliable decent for a wide variety of needs - that’s ultimately its selling point
  - mark38848 2y ago
    It has no "selling" points. If it had any pecuniary cost nobody would use it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
exabrial 2y ago
I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I did try to learn the ins-outs of vscode and I wasn't impressed after a few months. It has about the 1/16 of the capabilities of Eclipse, and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins. Compare that to regular ol' Eclipse, which presents a unified editing interface for every language and file type. I used IntelliJ for a brief stint and I would say it's very polished and a lot of small annoyances with Eclipse it doesn't have, and it exceeds Eclipse in several areas, but not to the point where I would go relearn an entire tool. So yeah... I'll probably just stick with Eclipse until I can't anymore!
- hobs 2y ago
  Yeah, I was lucky that early in my career a swdev turned me onto intellij stuff, it's sometimes second best at stuff and sometimes the bugs are 10 years old with no fixes in sight, but it still feels way better all the time than vscode.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  I have never used an IDE more opaque than Eclipse, you can feel the crusty Java code everywhere. I don't particularly like VSCode, but your criticisms are simply not true (anymore). It has GUI settings, it is pretty stable and you can make things go away.
  - peterashford 2y ago
    Intellij, Resharper et al are Java IDEs and they're the best in the business
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      ReSharper is written in C#, not Java.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      Rider has the shared "IDE" part with IntelliJ and others, written in Java, but the back-end and numerous other components are written in C#.
  - exabrial 2y ago
    I was speaking about my experience 8 months ago, so... yeah.
- thiht 2y ago
  > and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins That’s… extremely far from my experience with VSCode, are you sure you’re even talking about VSCode? I’ve literally never had anything break after an update, not even a plugin. Not saying it doesn’t happen, because it definitely does (every version is followed by 1 or 2 patches in the following days), but it’s usually about pretty niche breakages. All popups and toasters have a cog wheel on the top right that let you tell them to never show up, if you wish. And to be fair, there are very few, the only ones that come to mind are "oh I know this file type; do you want to install the appropriate extension?", which is honestly a welcome hint (that you can disable globally if you don’t like it). What you call "distractions that never go away" I’m not sure, because almost everything in the UI can be hidden. What do you think count as a distraction? Regarding the settings, it’s plain wrong. The settings have had a visual editing interface for years, and the underlying JSON is definitely typed. If you add a key that doesn’t exist, it’ll be greyed out. Invalid values have a red squiggle. I have no idea what you mean with "incoherent user experience depending on plugins", specifically because the extension API doesn’t let extensions do incoherent stuff.
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
It's ridiculous how bloated Eclipse used to be perceived, and how lightweight it is now compared to VS Code. Eclipse can run on a 256MB Java heap...
- bitwize 2y ago
  Eclipse seemed to me to be a "substrate for Eclipse plugins" first and foremost, whereas both NetBeans and IntelliJ struck me as "tools for writing code" first.
  - atombender 2y ago
    That's how it was designed, from even back when it was VisualAge and written in SmallTalk. Eclipse is basically a language-neutral UI "shell", the "Eclipse Tool Platform", where all language/code-related functionality is provided as bundles of extensions. And then extensions can be extended, and so on. Eventually they standardized the extension system around an extension/component framework called OSGi. Not sure if this new Eclipse IDE uses it.
lelanthran 2y ago
> Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? I do. It was used as the basis for code-sourcery, which was the foundation for many a vendors embedded toolkit. More recently, I used it for ESP development, and I was absolutely floored that Eclipse is, in 2024, a lightweight and featureful alternative to VSCode. My prior memories of Eclipse was that, once started, it would slow my machine to a crawl. Now it runs lighter than the most popular "modern" editors; after doing the ESP project, I noticed just how laggy VSCode is. It could do with a few plugins, though. Copilot, and things like that.
- democracy 2y ago
  Copilot works fine on eclipse
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > Copilot works fine on eclipse TIL :-)
makeitdouble 2y ago
I think the negativity should be towards Java and its sluggishness when it came to desktop applications. Eclipse was the effort that made it decent, and it took a long time before we had IDEs that were competitive for some languages. I remember the php extension being surprisingly good.
- sam_bristow 2y ago
  Most of _my_ negativity towards Eclipse is all the shit-tier tools built on top by embedded software vendors.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    Sigh... I'm with you here. Like yes it's pretty cool to be able to configure your pinmux and peripheral clocks and all that directly from the IDE and have it end up as source in your project. But no it's not cool to not have a supported way to do a command-line build.
paulddraper 2y ago
Some more details would be nice. What made it less than positive?
seabird 2y ago
The IDE is pretty damn good. Plenty of shitty parts but all said and done, VS Code can't even scratch the way that I can rearrange the UI to fit everything I need to see when doing firmware development, at least not without a lot of screwing around. Really not looking forward to VS Code wiping it out in the next 5-10 years.
elric 2y ago
I still use the Eclipse IDE on a daily basis for Java development. I like it a lot better than the alternatives. A lot of people seem to prefer IntelliJ's expensive bloatware, but that just doesn't do it for me. I will repeat my usual complaint: I wish the Eclipse Foundation would invest more into making the IDE better, and I wish they would make it easier for people to contribute to it.
- mark38848 2y ago
  I mean you still use Java, so you seem to really like sticking to your tools!
  - bradboimler 2y ago
    I love programming in Java!
  - elric 2y ago
    I also still breathe air. What's your point? Java is a useful language with many excellent features and a standard library that is better than any other standard library in any other language (fight me on this). It has a thriving ecosystem, with many excellent high quality resources.
- brabel 2y ago
  > IntelliJ's expensive bloatware I am pretty sure the free Community Edition is still much better than Eclipse.
  - ayewo 2y ago
    Is there really an IntelliJ iDea (Ultimate) Community Edition outside of Android Studio? I’ve also tried to use their products but by the time I need to, my 30-day has already expired so I just stick with Eclipse and VSCode.
    - pledg 2y ago
      Ultimate is paid, community is separate. You still get plenty https://www.jetbrains.com/products/compare/?product=idea&product=idea-ce https://www.jetbrains.com/products/compare/?product=idea&pro...
IshKebab 2y ago
Yeah I agree. Eclipse was overall a bad experience and I think most people saw it the same way so it does seem odd to reuse the brand. I mean the people involved in Eclipse obviously like Eclipse so they probably don't realise. The thing I hated most was the workspace concept. I don't want to put all my projects in one directory or have to make a workspace just to open a project. In every other IDE you can just open a project without weird and confusing restrictions. It also crashed quite a lot - not fully, you just get a dialog box saying there was a null pointer exception. Also every app I've used that has been based on Eclipse has been awful. Teamcenter was probably the worst. So slow you could literally watch it drawing widgets. The one positive I will say is that there's a state machine plugin that's really good, and it uses the Eclipse Layout Kernel which is so good at layout out diagrams that it's been ripped out of Eclipse and even converted to JavaScript.
itronitron 2y ago
Yes, very positive, I've used Eclipse for many years, primarily for Java. I also have a license for IntelliJ but how it does code completion and other aspects of it's UI have always irritated me. So I'm back to Eclipse, and will probably check out Theia as well. Hopefully they add Go support if it isn't already there.
wkat4242 2y ago
For me it was so so so bad when I used it. Buggy, slow confusing and weird. I hated it with a passion. Admittedly I never used it vanilla but only as a base of other crappy tools. But that was Java eclipse. And I kinda hate everything related to Java.
brnt 2y ago
I used it 20 years ago after having worked a bit with Python and C++ for 2-3 years. I was productive in a day (I didn't know Java), had a functioning GUI day 2. Yes, it seems overwhelming and there is the 'workspace' concept which seems too much abstraction. It's only in the way if you are too attached to your own way of working. If you just begin coding, it actually is quite intuitive.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

I once used eclipse c development tools to hack frogcomposband to my whim and desire, it was a decent experience for "free"

InfiniteRand 2y ago
Eclipse is reliable decent for a wide variety of needs - that’s ultimately its selling point
- mark38848 2y ago
  It has no "selling" points. If it had any pecuniary cost nobody would use it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

exabrial 2y ago

I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I did try to learn the ins-outs of vscode and I wasn't impressed after a few months. It has about the 1/16 of the capabilities of Eclipse, and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins. Compare that to regular ol' Eclipse, which presents a unified editing interface for every language and file type. I used IntelliJ for a brief stint and I would say it's very polished and a lot of small annoyances with Eclipse it doesn't have, and it exceeds Eclipse in several areas, but not to the point where I would go relearn an entire tool. So yeah... I'll probably just stick with Eclipse until I can't anymore!

hobs 2y ago
Yeah, I was lucky that early in my career a swdev turned me onto intellij stuff, it's sometimes second best at stuff and sometimes the bugs are 10 years old with no fixes in sight, but it still feels way better all the time than vscode.
constantcrying 2y ago
I have never used an IDE more opaque than Eclipse, you can feel the crusty Java code everywhere. I don't particularly like VSCode, but your criticisms are simply not true (anymore). It has GUI settings, it is pretty stable and you can make things go away.
- peterashford 2y ago
  Intellij, Resharper et al are Java IDEs and they're the best in the business
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    ReSharper is written in C#, not Java.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    Rider has the shared "IDE" part with IntelliJ and others, written in Java, but the back-end and numerous other components are written in C#.
- exabrial 2y ago
  I was speaking about my experience 8 months ago, so... yeah.
thiht 2y ago
> and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins That’s… extremely far from my experience with VSCode, are you sure you’re even talking about VSCode? I’ve literally never had anything break after an update, not even a plugin. Not saying it doesn’t happen, because it definitely does (every version is followed by 1 or 2 patches in the following days), but it’s usually about pretty niche breakages. All popups and toasters have a cog wheel on the top right that let you tell them to never show up, if you wish. And to be fair, there are very few, the only ones that come to mind are "oh I know this file type; do you want to install the appropriate extension?", which is honestly a welcome hint (that you can disable globally if you don’t like it). What you call "distractions that never go away" I’m not sure, because almost everything in the UI can be hidden. What do you think count as a distraction? Regarding the settings, it’s plain wrong. The settings have had a visual editing interface for years, and the underlying JSON is definitely typed. If you add a key that doesn’t exist, it’ll be greyed out. Invalid values have a red squiggle. I have no idea what you mean with "incoherent user experience depending on plugins", specifically because the extension API doesn’t let extensions do incoherent stuff.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

It's ridiculous how bloated Eclipse used to be perceived, and how lightweight it is now compared to VS Code. Eclipse can run on a 256MB Java heap...

bitwize 2y ago
Eclipse seemed to me to be a "substrate for Eclipse plugins" first and foremost, whereas both NetBeans and IntelliJ struck me as "tools for writing code" first.
- atombender 2y ago
  That's how it was designed, from even back when it was VisualAge and written in SmallTalk. Eclipse is basically a language-neutral UI "shell", the "Eclipse Tool Platform", where all language/code-related functionality is provided as bundles of extensions. And then extensions can be extended, and so on. Eventually they standardized the extension system around an extension/component framework called OSGi. Not sure if this new Eclipse IDE uses it.

lelanthran 2y ago

> Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? I do. It was used as the basis for code-sourcery, which was the foundation for many a vendors embedded toolkit. More recently, I used it for ESP development, and I was absolutely floored that Eclipse is, in 2024, a lightweight and featureful alternative to VSCode. My prior memories of Eclipse was that, once started, it would slow my machine to a crawl. Now it runs lighter than the most popular "modern" editors; after doing the ESP project, I noticed just how laggy VSCode is. It could do with a few plugins, though. Copilot, and things like that.

democracy 2y ago
Copilot works fine on eclipse
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > Copilot works fine on eclipse TIL :-)

makeitdouble 2y ago

I think the negativity should be towards Java and its sluggishness when it came to desktop applications. Eclipse was the effort that made it decent, and it took a long time before we had IDEs that were competitive for some languages. I remember the php extension being surprisingly good.

sam_bristow 2y ago
Most of _my_ negativity towards Eclipse is all the shit-tier tools built on top by embedded software vendors.
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  Sigh... I'm with you here. Like yes it's pretty cool to be able to configure your pinmux and peripheral clocks and all that directly from the IDE and have it end up as source in your project. But no it's not cool to not have a supported way to do a command-line build.

paulddraper 2y ago

Some more details would be nice. What made it less than positive?

seabird 2y ago

The IDE is pretty damn good. Plenty of shitty parts but all said and done, VS Code can't even scratch the way that I can rearrange the UI to fit everything I need to see when doing firmware development, at least not without a lot of screwing around. Really not looking forward to VS Code wiping it out in the next 5-10 years.

elric 2y ago

I still use the Eclipse IDE on a daily basis for Java development. I like it a lot better than the alternatives. A lot of people seem to prefer IntelliJ's expensive bloatware, but that just doesn't do it for me. I will repeat my usual complaint: I wish the Eclipse Foundation would invest more into making the IDE better, and I wish they would make it easier for people to contribute to it.

mark38848 2y ago
I mean you still use Java, so you seem to really like sticking to your tools!
- bradboimler 2y ago
  I love programming in Java!
- elric 2y ago
  I also still breathe air. What's your point? Java is a useful language with many excellent features and a standard library that is better than any other standard library in any other language (fight me on this). It has a thriving ecosystem, with many excellent high quality resources.
brabel 2y ago
> IntelliJ's expensive bloatware I am pretty sure the free Community Edition is still much better than Eclipse.
- ayewo 2y ago
  Is there really an IntelliJ iDea (Ultimate) Community Edition outside of Android Studio? I’ve also tried to use their products but by the time I need to, my 30-day has already expired so I just stick with Eclipse and VSCode.
  - pledg 2y ago
    Ultimate is paid, community is separate. You still get plenty https://www.jetbrains.com/products/compare/?product=idea&product=idea-ce https://www.jetbrains.com/products/compare/?product=idea&pro...

IshKebab 2y ago

Yeah I agree. Eclipse was overall a bad experience and I think most people saw it the same way so it does seem odd to reuse the brand. I mean the people involved in Eclipse obviously like Eclipse so they probably don't realise. The thing I hated most was the workspace concept. I don't want to put all my projects in one directory or have to make a workspace just to open a project. In every other IDE you can just open a project without weird and confusing restrictions. It also crashed quite a lot - not fully, you just get a dialog box saying there was a null pointer exception. Also every app I've used that has been based on Eclipse has been awful. Teamcenter was probably the worst. So slow you could literally watch it drawing widgets. The one positive I will say is that there's a state machine plugin that's really good, and it uses the Eclipse Layout Kernel which is so good at layout out diagrams that it's been ripped out of Eclipse and even converted to JavaScript.

itronitron 2y ago

Yes, very positive, I've used Eclipse for many years, primarily for Java. I also have a license for IntelliJ but how it does code completion and other aspects of it's UI have always irritated me. So I'm back to Eclipse, and will probably check out Theia as well. Hopefully they add Go support if it isn't already there.

wkat4242 2y ago

For me it was so so so bad when I used it. Buggy, slow confusing and weird. I hated it with a passion. Admittedly I never used it vanilla but only as a base of other crappy tools. But that was Java eclipse. And I kinda hate everything related to Java.

brnt 2y ago

I used it 20 years ago after having worked a bit with Python and C++ for 2-3 years. I was productive in a day (I didn't know Java), had a functioning GUI day 2. Yes, it seems overwhelming and there is the 'workspace' concept which seems too much abstraction. It's only in the way if you are too attached to your own way of working. If you just begin coding, it actually is quite intuitive.