
Goodbye to Eclipse – the end of an era as an Eclipse plugin developer - dcminter
http://pureconcepture.blogspot.com/2017/07/goodbye-to-eclipse-end-of-era-for.html
======
foepys
Google did not rewrite their Android IDE. IntelliJ IDEA had Android support
for years and Google collaborated with Jetbrains to create a dedicated IDE for
Android. Jetbrains has a lot of experience in specialized IDE and
corresponding plugins for their main IDE IntelliJ. It was the right choice by
Google to support and utilize a team of smart developers that already created
something superior to Eclipse ADT on their own.

~~~
IshKebab
IMO Google made IntelliJ's Android support worse. They added a million items
to the menus (like Eclipse), somehow made it slower, replaced IntelliJ's fast
and simple project system with Gradle, which is slow and breaks all the time.
Bit of a shame really.

Still a million times better than Eclipse though.

~~~
adadad3442
IntelliJ doesn't have a dedicated build system. You can choose from no system,
Maven, and Gradle.

No system is often good enough for basic projects, but not Android
development. Support libraries, configuration, API versions, NDK support, etc.
make Gradle a requirement. Gradle is the official build system of Android for
a reason, it's not something that Google just added willy-nilly to Android
Studio.

As an Android developer, I LOVE Gradle. I think it's a vastly superior build
system. I also use it for complex desktop applications, and applications that
run on both desktop and Android, using shared code and OS-dependent code (the
module system makes this very easy to organize).

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chapill
To the author, I actually used RustDT for a while and liked it. I gave up on
it when I found it was supported by only one person.

I predicted that you would lose interest and move on to something else, and my
workflow would have then depend on abandonware. A gentle bit of advice: Team
up with someone as enthusiastic about the idea as you. If you can't find
anyone interested, that's probably a signal not to work on the thing.

You might want to check out sulong,

[https://github.com/graalvm/sulong](https://github.com/graalvm/sulong)

It sounds like a project you could contribute a lot to. There are a few core
committers and it sounds like you're interested in staying on the JVM.
Compiling Rust to JVM and having a decent IDE for the language would be really
nice too.

Finally, remember one thing about IntelliJ. It's popular because of Google,
and as you have witnessed with Eclipse, Google is fickle. Chasing Google's
whims seems like a bad idea in the long run.

~~~
pas
> IntelliJ [is] popular because of Google, ...

IDEA is and was pretty well established in the Java/Scala world. Android
Studio is the cherry on top.

------
didibus
I think there's opportunity for a new, more modern IDE. Something better then
Eclipse and IntelliJ, but that's not built on top of JavaScript. Doubt there's
the funding for it though, but there's definitely the need (of devs hungry for
it, but not willing to pay anything for it either).

~~~
whatever_dude
> but that's not built on top of JavaScript

I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see _why_.
Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS?

VSC feels super fast to me. It certainly has better performance than Eclipse
ever had, and feels less janky than IntelliJ.

I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a
certain threshold where it's _just fast enough_. And that's where VSC is.

~~~
chapill
I have aarch64 and 4GB of memory. Electron apps are not kind to either.

[http://roryok.com/blog/2017/08/electron-memory-usage-
compare...](http://roryok.com/blog/2017/08/electron-memory-usage-compared-to-
other-cross-platform-frameworks/)

Netbeans nightly and JDK9 is quite nice on this platform.

~~~
acdha
So will a well-written Electron app like VSCode. It's not like Java hasn't had
the exact same challenges leveled for decades because people wrote bad code
without thinking about resource usage.

~~~
chapill
I don't see an aarch64 or arm linux distribution for VSCode.

[https://code.visualstudio.com/Download](https://code.visualstudio.com/Download)

Java works now. VS Code doesn't. Neither does Atom. Or any other Electron app.
ARM is a pretty popular arch these days. They might want to work on that.

~~~
acdha
This thread started with a complaint about building things in a language which
wasn't JavaScript. Getting better ARM support is a reasonable thing – and they
have open work on GitHub to save you the trouble of building it yourself – but
it doesn't have much to do with the language.

------
zmmmmm
I was hoping the author would talk more about the underlying technical reasons
for the problems, as I would have thought he would have insight into that as a
plugin developer. It seems like his reasons are really mostly around it losing
mindshare and being a waste of his life and the technical is actually less
important (even if it is a cause of the former).

I still use eclipse because I haven't found anything else that embraces true
full multi-language development the way Eclipse does. That is, in one IDE I
have front end, middle tier and back end code all in different languages,
sitting next to each other as first class citizens. I can set a breakpoint in
my PHP code and my Java code and my Python code, and I can have the source
windows right next to each other and debug them in parallel. I just don't know
anything else that does that so well.

I also find Eclipse's incremental compile model invaluable. I was kind of
shocked when I tried out IntelliJ and had to wait 15 seconds while it ran
Gradle for it to tell me about a compile error.

So I'm definitely in the club of being sad it's losing mindshare.

------
onychomys
Come, ex-eclipsians, join the weirdo minority who use netbeans! We don't bite,
I promise! And there are literally dozens of us across the world!

~~~
your-nanny
I like netbeans but was absolutely unusable on my brand new iMac; the lag.

------
13years
Yes, as an eclipse plugin developer myself, I made this to bring as much of
the lightweight experience from sublime and vscode to Eclipse.

It is basically a next-gen command palette. Much better than the builtin quick
access in Eclipse.

[https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-
commander](https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander)

------
sigi45
I love eclipse and we used eclipse for over a year until we switched to
intellij.

The main reason: Updating intellij just works. Updating eclipse on arch linux
meant that i have to readd the marketplace url for the proper version, add the
maven plugin again and than it worked.

Yes this small detail sucked and yes it just works better in intellij.

------
Tharkun
I've been using Eclipse for what seems like forever. But it feels like with
each new release, Eclipse gets worse. More freezes, more crashes, more _really
weird_ behaviour, slower code completion. The fact that I _still_ can't turn
off retarded core plugins (like the horrible Git plugin) bugs me to no end.
Every time I install a new version, I have to remember to go in and delete the
Git plugin jars because it fucks up my workflow.

I'll keep using it, because IntelliJ is almost as bad _and_ has a GUI paradigm
I can't get used to. But eventually that balance is going to shift.

If Eclipse is suffering from a lack of man power, they might want to consider
making it easier to contribute.

~~~
chapill
>I deleted core jars from the distribution. It freezes and crashes all the
time. Wow, Eclipse sucks.

Thanks dude. I just sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. The laugh was worth
it though.

------
jay-anderson
We're a mostly java shop at work and I'm one of the last few hold outs still
on eclipse. I'm used to it and it mostly does what I need. I use the excellent
vrapper
([http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/](http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/)),
but even that has ceased development it seems. Last I tried intellij the vi
plugin was unusable for me. I periodically think it's time to give it a try
again. It is too bad the eclipse seems to be falling behind and losing
mindshare.

~~~
nambit
Something else you could try is [http://eclim.org/](http://eclim.org/) . It's
the only thing I really miss about eclipse.

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sreque
This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely
wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more
obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is
superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike
Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the
world drifting to the inferior choice?

~~~
bdamm
How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: *
Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting
up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.

~~~
chapill
Eclipse git support is superior as well as the pom editor.

~~~
Lewton
Eclipses git support: right click on a file, show history, navigate between
classes, notice eclipse hanging every time you switch between classes because
it’s spending unreasonable amounts of time loading the git history while
blocking the main thread every time with no caching whatsoever

Facepalm

I run into thousands of moronic things like that on an average work week

~~~
fian
I use Eclipse with Subversion as the VCS. With Subversion you can disable to
automatic History tab update on selection change (ie unlink from Editor). Can
you not do the same with the Git functionality?

------
ivcha
I don't understand what exactly is the reason people don't like Eclipse. The
features and the overall feeling of using the IDE is great, that's why I am
still using Eclipse (mostly Java and Scala development), so are many of my
colleagues. I guess there are some downsides, like slower leading times and a
bit clunky compilation process, but other than that, it's a solid IDE.

~~~
zmmmmm
Everyone complains that it is bloated and slow, but I think a lot of people
run it with too little memory. I always change the default settings to give it
2g of memory and it always runs fast. Some people think that's ridiculous, but
given I spend 70% of my time in that environment, I'm more than happy to have
it use that much memory.

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InTheArena
I made the switch to jetbrains a while ago, but the one feature i really
really miss is the absolute to focus on a set of files and resources and hide
all the other unrelated code.

Mylyn alone makes me go back every now and then, but eclipse is just too
bloated and unpredictable

~~~
laurence-myers
I think you can achieve this by creating a "Scope" and filtering to it in the
Project view.

------
ssebastianj
Something I didn't know until recently was that PyCharm debugger was a cross-
project cooperation between PyDev people and PyCharm people [0]

[0] [https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-
intervie...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-interview-
with-pydev-and-pycharm/)

------
ChuckMcM
I went to a seminar hosted by FAI to talk about Cypress wireless chips and
Murata Modules. Their IDE "WICD" is based on Eclipse. When I saw that I was
surprised because I thought Eclipse was not getting much active development.

Their use of it was faster than I remember but just as difficult to navigate.

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naviehuynh
Bye Eclipse, you won't be missed >.<

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pvg
This is from July 2017.

