4 ms·

> Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays? Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start

by josephg 9mo ago

> Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays? Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades on our computers because the default company issued machines (which were quite good at the time) didn't have enough RAM to use eclipse properly. I can't imagine why it went out of favour...

Alupis 9mo ago
How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.
- Semaphor 9mo ago
  I used eclipse in university around that time (2005), then first switched to netbeans which I already liked more, then discovered IntelliJ and have been using that ever since. Everything about Eclipse felt worse in ways neither of the others did, but all of that was still during university (though I now use JetBrains professionally).
- morcus 9mo ago
  > Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student. My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.
  - DrewADesign 9mo ago
    Right, but it’s essentially a fancy text editing environment. It should never have needed anything but barebones hardware.
    - rovr138 9mo ago
      > essentially a fancy text editing environment No, it’s an IDE first. Not a text editor that’s extensible. It has a lot of features built-in, pre-enabled, and configured out of the box. Yes, it can edit text. But it can do a lot more.
      - gosub100 9mo ago
        And it clearly violated the "only pay for what you use" philosophy. Like driving a bulldozer to get a soda.
      - DrewADesign 9mo ago
        Until you actually do any of those things, an IDE is a fancy text editor.
        rovr138 9mo ago
        and a 747 is a nice bed until you fly it. Doesn't mean it's overkill and a plane.
        DrewADesign 9mo ago
        That's an absurd comparison, and you know it. Until an IDE actually performs some task that requires more advanced functionality, like analyzing a complex existing project to open without anything cached, compiling, profiling, etc. it is literally just editing text files. The only IDE that I use that takes anywhere CLOSE to the amount of time that Eclipse does to get moving is Unreal Engine. Any Jetbrains IDE, X Code, Visual Studio... all blow it away. I just opened a project in Visual Studio 2022 on a portability-focused laptop from 2018-- from click to the project open screen, it was about 3 seconds. From the project open screen to having an existing project completely open, it was 3 or so more seconds. On an 8 year old, tiny, not-optimized windows laptop.
- josephg 9mo ago
  It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that. They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE. In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size. I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.
  - Alupis 9mo ago
    That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse? Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram. Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish. Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.
    - dragonwriter 9mo ago
      > That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse? In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.
  - iberator 9mo ago
    16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram
    - elzbardico 9mo ago
      At this time laptops still could have memory upgrades, and memory was pretty cheap compared to today. The first thing I did when I bought a new laptop was buying two 8GB SoDIMMs, it was way cheaper than ordering the upgrade from factory. The thing is, memory in personal computer have plateaued for quite some time. 16GB was not uncommon in 2010. Things are not like the crazy 90s and early 2000s where PC configuration become obsolete in less than two years.
- bilekas 9mo ago
  > Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. this is a huge assumption and also ignores the fact that if it's not clear to users, it's a bad design.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  > Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. My first IDE was Turbo Pascal 2.0, about 20 years before I used Eclipse, and I used a lot in between (and since). Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use. A few of those problems probably would have been a little bit less noticeable on a ridiculously high-end machine, but not all of them, and other contemporary IDEs worked well-enough on lighter machines. And despite how much I disliked using Eclipse, I liked the idea of Eclipse, and kept it around because it was, for a while, occupying the niche of “extensible open source platform most popular to target for interesting dev tools” (because there weren't really any alternatives that were as open and extensible).
- trhway 9mo ago
  yes, 15 years ago 8GB was normal on notebook. We though started to use it in the early naughts on 256Mb. >Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. of course :)
someguyiguess 9mo ago
This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...) VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...) But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...
ryukoposting 9mo ago
> It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.
- GrayShade 9mo ago
  The indexer was probably clangd, not Code itself.
  - aragonite 9mo ago
    IME more likely cpptools (which comes with vscode) than clangd. Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332
    - ryukoposting 9mo ago
      That's correct. Clangd doesn't churn nearly as hard as cpptools, but it's also not nearly as good as cpptools.
z3t4 9mo ago
Todays hard drives are faster then memory was back then, so it's probably not an issue now. Could probably reparse your entire code base at every key stroke without you noticing.
- ahyattdev 9mo ago
  Modern PCIe NVME drives typically see a few microsecond latency, but even DDR2 latency was around 10 nanoseconds. Memory remains top dog by a long shot.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Definitely, it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace, and there are old Reddit comments of me complaining about in on /r/java. Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.
pjc50 9mo ago
We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!

by josephg 9mo ago

Alupis 9mo ago

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.

Semaphor 9mo ago
I used eclipse in university around that time (2005), then first switched to netbeans which I already liked more, then discovered IntelliJ and have been using that ever since. Everything about Eclipse felt worse in ways neither of the others did, but all of that was still during university (though I now use JetBrains professionally).
morcus 9mo ago
> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student. My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  Right, but it’s essentially a fancy text editing environment. It should never have needed anything but barebones hardware.
  - rovr138 9mo ago
    > essentially a fancy text editing environment No, it’s an IDE first. Not a text editor that’s extensible. It has a lot of features built-in, pre-enabled, and configured out of the box. Yes, it can edit text. But it can do a lot more.
    - gosub100 9mo ago
      And it clearly violated the "only pay for what you use" philosophy. Like driving a bulldozer to get a soda.
    - DrewADesign 9mo ago
      Until you actually do any of those things, an IDE is a fancy text editor.
      - rovr138 9mo ago
        and a 747 is a nice bed until you fly it. Doesn't mean it's overkill and a plane.
        DrewADesign 9mo ago
        That's an absurd comparison, and you know it. Until an IDE actually performs some task that requires more advanced functionality, like analyzing a complex existing project to open without anything cached, compiling, profiling, etc. it is literally just editing text files. The only IDE that I use that takes anywhere CLOSE to the amount of time that Eclipse does to get moving is Unreal Engine. Any Jetbrains IDE, X Code, Visual Studio... all blow it away. I just opened a project in Visual Studio 2022 on a portability-focused laptop from 2018-- from click to the project open screen, it was about 3 seconds. From the project open screen to having an existing project completely open, it was 3 or so more seconds. On an 8 year old, tiny, not-optimized windows laptop.
josephg 9mo ago
It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that. They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE. In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size. I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.
- Alupis 9mo ago
  That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse? Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram. Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish. Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    > That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse? In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.
- iberator 9mo ago
  16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram
  - elzbardico 9mo ago
    At this time laptops still could have memory upgrades, and memory was pretty cheap compared to today. The first thing I did when I bought a new laptop was buying two 8GB SoDIMMs, it was way cheaper than ordering the upgrade from factory. The thing is, memory in personal computer have plateaued for quite some time. 16GB was not uncommon in 2010. Things are not like the crazy 90s and early 2000s where PC configuration become obsolete in less than two years.
bilekas 9mo ago
> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. this is a huge assumption and also ignores the fact that if it's not clear to users, it's a bad design.
dragonwriter 9mo ago
> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE. My first IDE was Turbo Pascal 2.0, about 20 years before I used Eclipse, and I used a lot in between (and since). Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use. A few of those problems probably would have been a little bit less noticeable on a ridiculously high-end machine, but not all of them, and other contemporary IDEs worked well-enough on lighter machines. And despite how much I disliked using Eclipse, I liked the idea of Eclipse, and kept it around because it was, for a while, occupying the niche of “extensible open source platform most popular to target for interesting dev tools” (because there weren't really any alternatives that were as open and extensible).
trhway 9mo ago
yes, 15 years ago 8GB was normal on notebook. We though started to use it in the early naughts on 256Mb. >Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content. of course :)

someguyiguess 9mo ago

This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...) VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...) But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...

ryukoposting 9mo ago

> It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.

GrayShade 9mo ago
The indexer was probably clangd, not Code itself.
- aragonite 9mo ago
  IME more likely cpptools (which comes with vscode) than clangd. Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332
  - ryukoposting 9mo ago
    That's correct. Clangd doesn't churn nearly as hard as cpptools, but it's also not nearly as good as cpptools.

z3t4 9mo ago

Todays hard drives are faster then memory was back then, so it's probably not an issue now. Could probably reparse your entire code base at every key stroke without you noticing.

ahyattdev 9mo ago
Modern PCIe NVME drives typically see a few microsecond latency, but even DDR2 latency was around 10 nanoseconds. Memory remains top dog by a long shot.

pjmlp 9mo ago

Definitely, it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace, and there are old Reddit comments of me complaining about in on /r/java. Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.

pjc50 9mo ago

We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!