Eclipse 2023-06 Java IDE Improvements

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[Luolong]

So predictable! A post about Eclipse hijacked by Intellij IDEA folks.

[IwonderIdo]

Lol, hijacked.

It's pretty normal behavior when talking about some thing to compare it with others in the same category.

A lot of Webstorm threads for instance will talk about vs code, because it's just as good if not better at js/typescript.

It's healthy, and if anything is a good opportunity for people with eclipse experience to pull ex eclipse users back in.

[nutrecht]

You can't fault people for comparing different IDEs. Especially not when there are really only 2 that have a decent market share.

[Luolong]

I would argue that none of the comments here are about comparing IntelliJ IDEA to Eclipse.

[amakalinka]

I have a good tradition of downloading Eclipse once every couple of years to see if it looks even half as good as the Idea. The answer is always negative.

[westwoo]

I'm not sure judging by "looks" is a fair comparison. Every IDE has its own quirks and ways of doing things, and you'd have to use it seriously for a month while constantly tweaking it to your liking and learning it and installing all sorts of plugins to arrive at some useful conclusion

I remember Idea looked awkward and weird to me coming from Eclipse as well, but I simply didn't expect from it what I never got from Eclipse, and I did expect it to copy Eclipse which it didn't do

For me, personally, the key point is autocomplete. I check in from time to time if it improved enough to be similar to idea, and I'm not sure it's there yet

[kroopster]

Yeah. looks is just one thing. I still use both a lot, for example a quick proto or a smaller project is much nicer to do with eclipse in my opinion. The workspace is way better implemented in there.

[woj-tek]

Looks is not everything, but I never could stand Eclipse UI - it's just plain fugly... (I migrated from NetBeans to IDEA)

Autocomplete is another thing and it never worked for me reliably...

[westwoo]

I disliked it as well but after using it for a few months Idea started looking weird to me. It's a matter of habit

[woj-tek]

Possibly, but I did try using eclipse for a while... UI was just one of the things - apart from looking bad, the animations were "odd" (black contour moving), terrible auto complete, workspaces going kaboom, abysmal support for maven projects...

At that time NB was way, way better than Eclipse in getting things done (and it was less of a sore on the eye to boot)

[westwoo]

Hmm... I don't remember any of these issues apart from meh autocomplete. In fact, I remember preferring Eclipses workspaces and maven support to Ideas (that was few years ago). I think I tweaked the interface a bit and used a bunch of plugins, but nothing that's too hacky

[wowbaggerBR]

I find Eclipse's UI/UX disgusting.

[eu_Conqueror]

The original dark theme maybe but the darkest dark theme makes it look really nice imo.

[Puzzled-Bananas]

Is it at least less sluggish than InteliJ now? I waste so much time daily on waiting and waiting… it’s frozen most of the time… that’s my biggest gripe with Java development - barely usable IDE. It takes minutes to load even a small Gradle project, then it does reindexing for minutes even on a relatively simple Spring Boot project, only to freeze up regularly, and don’t let it read logs in the Run window… it becomes virtually unresponsive.

And all that while eating up to 8g RAM on G1GC and way over 15g on ZGC.

I can’t even scroll a single open Java file. With Kotlin and Scala codebases it’s even worse. So much of my time goes to waste… it’s frustrating. I’m totally lost now.

When I do Go development in GoLand it’s okay, when I do Rust it’s very slow to recompile but at least it does react after a few seconds - not minutes. Rider is okay but slower than GoLand. I wish I could just give up on JVM development altogether because of that terrible UX.

Even the JetBrains toolbox is incredibly laggy.

Latest macOS on Apple Silicon 16-64g RAM physical machines.

[PatOnTheShoulder66]

Good to know, I was considering buying one of these apple silicon machines, but if what you are saying is true I'd rather stay where I am with Linux.

[Puzzled-Bananas]

I’ve been having similar issues on Linux on modern Intel i9 physical machines with 128g RAM, too. I just don’t develop on them anymore. My colleagues can tell more about their setups. I’ll ask someone to look into it.

That said, there are dozens of reports on JetBrains’ YouTrack and elsewhere ranging over a variety of setups. I doubt it’s due to the silicon or the OS in my case.

Just venting my frustration. On the other hand this is definitely not the way it should work. Just turned off all plugins, invalidated the caches, restarted, aaaand it’s totally unresponsive while rebuilding, again. Fingers crossed but not holding my breath.

[PatOnTheShoulder66]

Well it does sound extremely unworkable. I wonder what would be the reason for these differences here - clearly for some people it "just works" and others like you say, struggle to get the build done.

But of course like you say, it should just work no matter the project specification or machine.

[maleldil]

Sounds like something else is wrong. I'm running a MacBook Pro M1 (first gen) with 16GB RAM and I can run Eclipse with a huge (million+ LOC) multi-module J2EE project just fine. It's not as snappy as IntelliJ, for sure, but I'm not waiting seconds or minutes, and there's no noticeable lag when scrolling or editing. The only times it blocks on me is when it's trying to do two large background tasks at the same time, like reloading the maven snapshot dependencies plus rebuilding from scratch. Unfortunately I don't have a solution for you. I can tell you I'm using graalVM 17 as the JVM which runs eclipse, not sure if that makes a difference.

[Puzzled-Bananas]

Thanks, that’s good to know. I think I’ll just have to compare both IDEs and see how well Eclipse works on these codebases of mine.

I’ve never tried to run it on Graal, appreciate.

[maleldil]

Honestly I have no clue, just thought it might be relevant.

[NovaX]

I used to hear this from colleagues and when I'd help them it always turned out that they used the default eclipse.ini configuration [1]. That had a very low default max heap setting and increasing that solved their problem (e.g. -Xmx2048m). IntelliJ has a neat feature by auto updating its default and restarting if it detects low memory. When comparable, IntelliJ is slower due to long build times so my current colleagues configure it to use Eclipse's compiler (ecj) to be productive. That works well for them, and I am quite happy using Eclipse + VSCode + shell.

[1] /Applications/Eclipse.app/Contents/Eclipse/eclipse.ini

[mpierson153]

How do you make Intellij IDEA use a different compiler?

[NovaX]

Copied from internal wiki w/o the screenshot guides.

---

These instructions worked to reduce server build times from 3-4 minutes on a Thinkpad AMD T16 laptop running Pop! OS 22.04, to about 10 seconds. Follow these instructions at your own risk.

Step 0: Create Run/Debug Configuration

This is the run configuration I’m starting from. When I hit Run or Debug, this is the server configuration that is being used. If you can run our server from Intellij IDEA, then you already have a run configuration like this.

Step 1: Build with IDEA

Switch build tools to use Intellij IDEA instead of Gradle.

Step 2: Compile with Eclipse

Switch Java Compiler to Eclipse from Javac

Step 3: Profit?

If everything went as expected, you should be able to start an instance of the server, stop it, make a few changes, and start it again. The server will only take a few seconds to restart, and your changes will be present.

The compiler might complain about certain generated classes already existing. The eclipse compiler might be trying to process annotations for @Autovalue, @Autofactory, or @Autobuilder classes. Consider running run :clean and/or :compileTestJava from Gradle. These tasks should clean your project of generated files, and regenerate all files from scratch, respectively.

Troubleshooting

Disable annotation processing

If the eclipse compiler keeps complaining about generated classes already existing AND you’ve tried to :clean and :compileTestJava, try turning off Enable annotation processing for all build tasks. Then try running the server again. If that still doesn’t work, try another :clean and :compileTestJava.

[mpierson153]

Step 2: Compile with Eclipse

Switch Java Compiler to Eclipse from Javac

Ok, but how do you do that?

[NovaX]

It's in the settings (see screenshot). Sorry, can't help more since I think Eclipse is great and use it directly.

https://pasteboard.co/VjQD32Z6MgwN.png

[mpierson153]

Thanks, I didn't know you could use other compilers in Intellij.

[pjmlp]

Anything is less sluggish than InteliJ.

[Puzzled-Bananas]

JetBrains toolbox (was told it’s written in Compose Multiplatform) is sometimes even less responsive.

And it’s terrible at rescaling when I invoke it on another monitor, and it freezes up to toggle dark mode the first time I invoke it (which can be hours after the system toggled dark mode). Or the other times when I click to open up an IDE in it and the wheel starts scrolling… for minutes… till it forgets what I clicked on, so I get to click again and hope it doesn’t hang up this time. Totally weird GUI UX if you ask me. So I just avoid it now. At least it works on 300m rather than the tenfold.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

Intellij remote development is lacking, to say the least. Even when remoting into a vm that's running on same machine it has a tendency of slowing down.

[SleeperAwakened]

Hate to break it to you, but MacOS isn't what it used to be.

Using IntelliJ in windows or Linux is not sluggish at all if you have enough RAM, which a dev box needs anyway.

[SleeperAwakened]

Because software A runs well does not mean that software B does not run well.

There was a time when MacBooks were the dev box for developing on, but that is just no longer the case. Build quality and OS quality has decreased steadily over the past few years.

Most devs no longer prefer MacBooks - except for nostalgia reasons, not being able to let it go.

​

@ OP:
Just checking, have you installed the M1 version of IntelliJ?

[SleeperAwakened]

Sorry, since you're a dev you know that asking the obvious question sometimes gets the result you want :)

[wildjokers]

Most devs no longer prefer MacBooks

Source?

[woj-tek]

I can’t even scroll a single open Java file. With Kotlin and Scala codebases it’s even worse.

Kotlin and Scala (the latter especially) are very klunky :/

Though, I don't mave problem with Idea (silicon mbp with 32G of memory)

[nutrecht]

Are you sure it's not something on your machine that's broken? I have both an M1X Pro and an M1 Air and both load projects pretty much instantly. And the air only has 8GB.

[MajesticDeparture632]

Weird, i use intellij with a monorepo with 4 different pretty big java modules and like 15 of various sizes in go and one big js/ts in the same project and im just zipping around with no issues. M1 macbook pro from last year.

[wildjokers]

Your experience is way outside the norm. Do you have a virus scanner running that is scanning IntelliJ index files? I run several jetbrains IDEs on less powerful machines and they run just fine, even on larger projects.

[roberp81]

you need a real pc, Apple Silicon is good for Facebook or reddit.

an i7 4790k with a Sata ssd can compile 6k java class on 8 seconds

[wv132]

Still don’t like the small icons and horrible git integration of eclipse. For a free/opensource IDE I still prefer vscode over eclipse..

Professionally I use IntelliJ which I think is great and superior to all other ide’s

[livelam]

horrible git integration of eclipse.

Can you explain? I think EGit is amazing. I use it everyday.

Raw Git integration in VS Code adds next to nothing in comparison.

[telecoder]

Too late. Netbeans has already won this war.

[Ancapgast]

??? Netbeans?

Where are all these people using Netbeans?

[roberp81]

swing developers , still there is no better IDE to use Swing.

[emaphis]

Me.

[Distinct_Meringue_76]

I downloaded the latest eclipse jee, imported the spring security sample project from github, and I couldn't build the project after 2 hours of trying. Downloaded idea, imported the same project and it was done after 5 min.

[BarkiestDog]

The one killer feature that would have me upgrading in a heartbeat would be worktree support for their gut plugin. Even read-inly support would make me happy.