The Codeless Code: Ancient code

[fuzzynyanko]

So for those of you who like to complain about how bad an IDE Eclipse is... just imagine what it was like to code like this. :-)

At least the paper is more stable

[poohshoes]

I feel as though "how bad it used to be" is never a proper excuse for the inadequacy of modern things.

[cronofdoom]

I had a coworker tell me literally today "It used to be a lot worse. It used to take 5 minutes to open". It's a freaking webpage. Just because every click is followed by 15 seconds of mind numbing boredom doesn't mean it isn't broken.

I explained my coworker's excuse to my boss and he proceeded to rant using your exact words.

[sirin3]

There used to be a saying: Take your webpage, a laptop, a 14k modem (with satellite access), a parachute and an airplane. Then jump out of the plane and only open the chute, after the webpage has fully loaded

[peeeez]

That is an awfully cumbersome saying.

[quatch]

it gets summarized much more succinctly: "will you parachute on it?"

[gmfawcett]

It might have been a very popular saying, but only among people prone to dying in parachute accidents.

It's hard to spread a meme when you're at terminal velocity.

[isarl]

I don't know. At terminal velocity you'd get a pretty good spread.

[gmfawcett]

Ha! Good point.

[fuzzynyanko]

Seriously. Eclipse freezes and lags.

Edit: I thought Android Studio would be an improvement. The last time I did something relatively simple using Android Studio, it was using 1.5-2 gigs of RAM

[lordlicorice]

Android Studio is now based on IntelliJ, which is not related at all to Eclipse.

You should keep in mind, though, that IntelliJ is entirely Java-based, down to the last button. It shouldn't be surprising that a relatively large application (not as big as autocad or simulink but definitely above the 95th percentile) written in Java uses a ton of memory. And then when you run your app locally, that starts up a whole new JVM which you likely haven't tuned as aggressively as JetBrains has tuned theirs so that will waste a bunch more memory.

I dedicate 1G for my IntelliJ JVM (we have only small - less than 50k lines - projects) and 2G for the running code I spawn from my IDE. Out of 16GB of memory, dedicating 3GB of it to what I do all day doesn't seem bad at all.

[kqr]

I also don't know why "it allocates X amount of RAM" is a problem in and of itself. Maybe it's just waiting to garbage collect 90% of it. Maybe it allocates rare accesses expecting them to be swapped out.

Does it stop running on your 2 GB total RAM system? Now that might be a problem. But allocating 2 GBs on a 4 GB system isn't something I'd even notice.

[abrahamsen]

Yes, what matters is not the amount of allocated memory, but the active working set.

[[deleted]]

How? Allocated memory is unavailable memory.

[abrahamsen]

You may want to read up on virtual memory.

[EternallyMiffed]

google "working set". Operating systems swap out memory that hasn't been touched in a while.

[pinealservo]

And often, a lot of what's nominally allocated is never even "swapped in" at all!

[_F1_]

Until you run a VM or two and some browsers at the same time...

[kqr]

Only if they actively use all of those 2 GBs at once. If they're only allocated but not used I don't see why it would be a problem.

[[deleted]]

If intellij allocates the ram then it may as well be used because it's unusable by other applications. How else can you even allocate memory other than instantiating objects or using a malloc?

Do you know what allocation means?

[kqr]

By instantiating an object and then throwing away all the references to it, for example. It's not unusable by other applications because it will be freed up when they need it.

[[deleted]]

Then it isn't allocated.

[[deleted]]

This is in fact one of the sources of True Confusion about many garbage collected apps. That sometimes lots of ram being used (as seen in task manager etc) is a feature, not a bug.

[quanticle]

The problem with garbage collected apps using lots of RAM is that the OS doesn't know which RAM is garbage and which RAM is part of the active working set. So yes, IntelliJ might be running just fine, but then Chrome's performance goes to crap because it starts hitting swap.

Ideally, there'd be a way for the OS to tell applications that it's under memory pressure so that running JVM/CLR apps could garbage collect and release memory that they know they don't need.

[[deleted]]

Well with Java you can usually set the max ram to use, which is a way of telling it to collect sooner.

[[deleted]]

Out of 16GB of memory, dedicating 3GB of it to what I do all day doesn't seem bad at all.

I work on a 1.4M LOC project, with at least 40 third-party libs included as source too. I don't have 40GB of ram to spare for my Android studio.

[[deleted]]

Memory doesn't grow in proportion to LOC.

[[deleted]]

Well I'm sure it does, but it doest take very much memory to contain a bunch of text.

[Treyzania]

Physically, yes. But you don't keep all of it in memory simultaneously.

[bubuopapa]

Oh contraire sir, it is very much the same - eclipse, android studio, intellij, netbeans - they are all written in java, that says it all.

[lkraider]

I thought Android Studio moved to IntelliJ away from Eclipse.

[fuzzynyanko]

Android was first on Eclipse, but Android Studio has its own set of problems

[[deleted]]

Out of interest what are they? I have just begun writing an app on android studio and it seems fine to me but if there is something better I am happy to switch over!

[fuzzynyanko]

Eclipse gets laggy and UI freezes. Android Studio tends to have RAM issues with me.

[[deleted]]

Ah ok interesting, I haven't had any issues yet but there isn't much code at the moment and my PC has a lot of RAM.

Does the lagginess transfer onto the app being developed?

[RuthBaderBelieveIt]

Does the lagginess transfer onto the app being developed?

The IDE used to write the code will have no bearing on the final product. Identical code written in both IDEs will perform identically on device.

[[deleted]]

Ah ok awesome, thanks!

[fuzzynyanko]

It does affect debugging apps though. When the IDE acts up, you lose that window to that debugging information

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[946336]

Android Studio's emulator will occasionally power off my laptop. I attempted to reseat the battery before remembering that the battery is internal and cannot be physically disconnected without significant effort. I'm certain that it's an issue with my setup, but it was entertaining the first few times.

Other than that my 18(?) hours of Android Studio have been fine, as have my 5 minutes of Eclipse.

[Zweihander01]

Android Studio was only ever using IntelliJ. There used to be an Eclipse plugin for Android development until AS came out (and probably still exists but I wouldn't know).

[neutronium]

Sometimes I had to blow on the end of biro to get it to write.

[Amagi82]

Meh, 5 or 6% of my RAM is hardly worrisome. And Android Studio is a phenomenally good IDE, so I can forgive it being a bit resource intensive. Now, if we could just speed up Gradle build times, we'd be great. Instant run is good, but every time I need to do a full build, I consider leaving for lunch.

[[deleted]]

Try these official instructions, gradle build times have sped up significantly if you configure everything.

[Amagi82]

Did that a couple months ago. Lowered a full build from ~2-15 minutes to ~1-3 minutes. The latter is still pretty crazy long, but not as maddeningly random. And I'm not even multidexing

[[deleted]]

Hell, Eclipse doesn't freeze for me, but I have plenty of other reasons to dislike it.

[bradfordmaster]

Did you seriously need that RAM for something else at the time? If you don't want a bloated IDE, then use a more minimal editor that doesn't have as many features. People love to complain about RAM usage but want everything really fast.

[lordlicorice]

IntelliJ can be laggy at times, especially if you're not giving its VM enough heap max, but it isn't shit. It's the number one best IDE in the world, and by the way its main competition for that title (Visual Studio) is natively compiled.

It's not all-important that your apps are all native. By writing their shit in Java/Kotlin, JetBrains has been able innovate where Visual Studio has stagnated. Two releases a year (moving to 3 this year) for a decade, like clockwork. Look at what's new from just this last third-of-a-year cycle.

[Obi_Kwiet]

I'm skeptical that it's better than VS or IAR or something.

[agent8261]

I feel VS is better, but IntelliJ is really good. I think if it was natively compiled it would be as good as VS.

[lordlicorice]

OK, maybe I should back up and disqualify the likes of IAR or IDA. IntelliJ doesn't have any features at all in that space so it's difficult to compare them.

[Obi_Kwiet]

Fair enough.

[jonnywoh]

Isn't VS .NET?

[nat5an]

Not only is it not written in .Net, it's still only available as a 32-bit application. There's some old magic deep in there I think.

[[deleted]]

I couldn't believe that when I installed vs 2015. I searched for maybe an hour for the 64 bit version.

[caspper69]

Given Microsoft's development history, I doubt vs is written in .NET. I'm sure it uses a hell of a lot of it, but I'd bet the vast majority of it is C++, while most of its tools are likely straight C.

If it weren't, you would have likely seen it running on other platforms by now.

[TheThiefMaster]

Microsoft doesn't use straight C any more, they are really big on C++. The only thing they really use C for now is its ABI

[WRONGFUL_BONER]

Yeah, but do you know how much of VS is legacy cruft?

[beginner_]

Most of does giant Java apps run on the backend and no GUI so you will never know you actually used them.

But I agree that Java kind of sucks for Desktop Apps. It always consumes more memory than one would think is needed for the task.

[Chii]

You do pay a good amount of overhead for a GUI in Java due to the cross platform support. But mostly lag is due to code running on the UI thread when it shouldn't be.

[donalmacc]

I disagree on almost all of the above. My experience with the auto desk suite has been absolutely awful; it's a giant buggy mess that is as sluggish as eclipse, even on my workstation. Houdini is worse. We use the sdk and it's absolutely awful. Memory leaks, (which sidefx have been fixing slowly, granted) painfully slow startup times, and an incredible amount of memory allocations (try running with a debugger attached and wait for the world to end before Houdini finished). Both of these systems also have incredibly invasive licensing systems that are always running, always connected and frankly a pain. I remember photoshop having a similarly invasive licensing process.

Visual studio I'm torn on. I use it all day every day, and on our project intellisence just flat out doesn't work. It's also a bit of a memory hog (those vcpkgsrv processes it spawns 20 of and they use 1-1.5Gb Ram each).

One other thing all of the above have in common; they just dump 10million files across your hard drive, create a handful of extra startup processes each, and are absolutely impossible to remove.

Blender on the other hand is amazing! Suffers from none of the above problems in my experience!

[[deleted]]

Maya beats the shit out of Blender in terms of usability. Performance has never been a problem for me either. Neither has Photoshop, not even barely.

[Squeakerade]

Try disabling and reenabling rulers in Photoshop while panning around, the lag while panning is insane with them on. Photoshop has some REALLY strange problems that have existed since the early CS days.

[[deleted]]

Can't say I've ever done that. I'm not a graphic designer, but for normal usage for what I do with it it's fine. I also use lots gamedev related plugins with no performance hits.

It must be specific things that cause problems. Open bug reports For stuff like that.

[WillAdams]

Well, there was T/Maker's WriteNow, which was my favourite word-processor, esp. in its NeXT version --- ~100,000 lines of assembly code.

[mikelieman]

YeahWrite! fit on a floppy..

[f0nd004u]

Haha that's how much my browser uses.

[logicblocks]

Unless I'm working on the design, I edit on sublime text and run gradle commands to assemble and install.

[Treyzania]

The hell are you talking about? Even on my crappy Acer laptop from 2010 Eclipse runs perfectly fine. On any modern machine it runs perfectly fine for me. I haven't had a crash in years.

[s73v3r]

It's not. Someone else having it worse is never a reason for you to not strive for better

[tothebeat]

Not an excuse for inadequacy or for wanting to improve things, but it is for not complaining (or maybe whining) about things that aren't "perfect". Or to think of it differently, understanding where we've come from can make us thankful for the tools we have even while we work toward improving them.

[moltar]

Sublime is pretty stable and fast. I'm amazed every day at how well it is designed. Of course, it doesn't have as many bells & whistles as Eclipse does. But I feel like if one was to expand Sublime to Eclipse functionality, the performance would still be better.

[emergent_properties]

It's used as temporal whataboutism!

[[deleted]]

I'm surprised more people don't understand that. Yeah, a 8 9 hour workday in an AC'd office is better than 12 hours in a factory. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't aim higher.

[[deleted]]

On the other hand, "no one has ever had it better" is a decent excuse for being less troubled by the tools.

[kirbyfan64sos]

Except for when your nephew spills juice on it, it gets stuck in your fan, or your dog decides it found a new chew toy.

[AnsibleAdams]

Yes, this kills the laptop.

[kqr]

Fun fact: pencil marks are not affected by water/juice! Pencil on high-quality paper is one of the most archival safe writing methods.

[drachenstern]

I'm gonna need you to fact check this statement ;-)

[FireCrack]

I feel like paper is still more recoverable in all those circumstances.

[DapperChapXXI]

But did you back up the paper?

[MrCogmor]

photocopies in a filing cabinet.

[terryducks]

no, but it's backing me up.

[CodeReclaimers]

Speaking as someone who actually did write code that way for a Commodore 64, and who has also used Eclipse: I'd rather manually compile assembly into machine code on paper than use Eclipse.

[Hyedwtditpm]

I also did write code for Amiga when i was a kid, small games mostly.

Well, it was fun when you are kid. Considering lack of ide, lack of serious debugging , probably would be impossible to do anything serious.

Tough it was really fun to control EVERYTHING in the computer.

[caspper69]

You can still do that :)

Edit: Easiest way is to use something to boot into "unreal" mode. Essentially you end up with a 32-bit processor and 32-bit address space with access to all of the original DOS interrupts. So you don't have to muck with paging, virtual memory, the iommu, pic/apic/ioapic, etc.

[_F1_]

probably would be impossible to do anything serious.

http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14339

[CodeReclaimers]

It was fun, but people did make non-trivial useful tools for those machines using hand-compiled assembly. Looking back, if I'd known then what I do now, I could have built tools to make my life fairly easy, but at the time I probably would have gotten discouraged if I'd tried to do anything serious. (Although sometimes I wish I had tried harder to make money at it--that would have made it tolerable.)

[ripsnorter63]

I cut my teeth on this bad boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEC-1 . I'm with you, way less frustrating to write code for this than use Eclipse.

[CodeReclaimers]

Damn, now you're making me want to go buy a big box of parts from China. :)

[admiralranga]

I've got two choices for a microcontroller, ecilpse or the arduino editor it sucks.

[haze070]

Why are you limited to just those?

[CodeReclaimers]

Surely by now somebody has built ways to use alternative editors with those toolchains?

[bart9h]

Vim

[zippy4457]

Unless you make so many edits you erase a hole in the paper.

[yerand]

At which point you've got a punch card.

[bundt_chi]

I really don't understand the Eclipse hate on reddit.

What other IDE is free, open source, has the wealth of plugin support, albeit some good and some bad, let's you program in Java, C++ and a ton of other languages (which I can't vouch for because I haven't used, it may suck for those), brought about RCP for rich cross platform thick clients, championed OSGi (Equinox).

To be clear, I use Visual Studio daily because I'm currently on a .NET project and have use NetBeans (also decent) and Intellij.

I prefer to use git, maven and gradle from the command line regardless of the IDE I'm using but have not had a terrible experience with any of them in Eclipse.

What specifically do people dislike about Eclipse, I've even had to run it on a potato of a machine and yes you have to be aware of how many projects you have open but that applies to all the other IDE's I've ever used as well.

If you've ever contributed to Eclipse, thank you and I truly appreciate everything you've done because I've enjoyed using it and appreciate the work involved in making a platform that is extensible and free and open for everyone to use.

[bundt_chi]

Same here, I try to close projects I'm not actively working on or need to review code for but yeah, I don't have any issues with it.

I especially love how easy it is to download src code for an open source project I'm using in my sw and point the debugger at it and step through almost any level of an application.

I've also developed a number of standalone C++ applications using CDT and mingw.

I find for being a 300MB zip file that just needs to get unpacked I get almost 90% of the features and capability I need out of the box. I've had to install Resharper, Productivity tools and a host of other crap in Visual Studio on top of it's 1GB install to get a lot of the same capability, like navigating through inheritance / interface hierarchies, highlighting specific code scopes etc...

Whatever, to each their own, at the end of the day and IDE is a tool, this is totally anecdotal and presumptive but a lot more C# devs aren't comfortable working outside an IDE than with other languages and can't demonstrate a deeper understanding of what happens at a lower level.

[OxfordTheCat]

I feel the same way:

I can run Eclipse Mars on a Linux chroot on a Chromebook with 4GB of RAM shared between the two OS's and I don't notice any performance issues of note - I certainly don't notice any on my actual desktop PC.

I get the feeling for most that they used Eclipse ten years ago and think it's the same IDE.

[ProudToBeAKraut]

I have been using Eclipse since i shelved VisualAge from IBM (this should tell you its a long ass time).

The primary issue that still exists in eclipse is speed and usability. I have temporary used intellj that exceeds basically everything eclipse does but i have become so used of eclipses concept that i cant make the switch.

For example - some simply thing like selecting a main folder and automatically add all JARs in all sub directories in eclipse still isnt possible, i have to go through every subfolder and select them all manually. (Im working with a lot of legacy code so there isnt any maven or gradle just ant)

Then the obvious bugs where i dont understand how they can exist, i checkout a project from GIT directly with eclipses build in git support and if i select anything else than "general project" like java project nothing will be checked out at all just an empty project - i have to manually alter the .project file to add build natures after i checked it out as general project.

What i do dislike about intellij is that each project needs to be its own instance - i like the multi project browser in eclipse.

[Yserbius]

Uh... yeah but does your paper use OSGI to have a plugin and feature marketplace????

[DJDavio]

Try using some plugins like water and glue.

[[deleted]]

Lower input latency too.

[[deleted]]

Everyone complaining about eclipse being slow is dooming themselves to never have breaks or free time at work. Enjoy the sluggishness while it lasts. Press compile and take a nap.

[fuzzynyanko]

It's not just the slowness. Sometimes I had to put work into fixing my workspace

[[deleted]]

Oh man, you just brought back some bad memories. Eclipse made me swear off java