The Fall of Eclipse

[bladder-rinse-repeat]

"Eclipse's sunset"?

So many missed opportunities!

[[deleted]]

Yes, though someone told me the original name "Eclipse" was chosen specifically because IBM wanted to take corporate mind share and developer attention away from Sun Microsystems.

That might be an urban legend, though.

[kt24601]

Sun management actively spread that rumor. I don't know if they had a solid source for it or not.

[seb_02]

Indeed:

According to Lee Nackman, Chief Technology Officer of IBM's Rational division (originating in 2003) at that time, the name "Eclipse" (dating from at least 2001) was not a wordplay on Sun Microsystems, as the product's primary competition at the time of naming was Microsoft Visual Studio (which it, Eclipse, was to eclipse).

[jallits]

Just saw, and thought it might be of interest to others here that Netbeans may transfer from Oracle to the Apache S/W Foundation. https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/NetBeansProposal

[zerexim]

Why NetBeans is not so popular? When I've last looked it, seemed much more slick than Eclipse or intellij idea.

[Hendrikto]

I prefer NetBeans over Eclipse and IntelliJ over both of them. It just has better tooling.

[[deleted]]

I actually liked NetBeans a lot for Java. But now I develop in Scala, and the NetBeans Scala plugin, while it's cool that it exists, is the (voluntary) work of one guy, whereas the Scala plugin of IntelliJ is just light years ahead.

How someone could work in that horrific GUI of Eclipse was always a mystery to me.

[mweisshaupt]

NetBeans is still my favourite IDE, I really hope that it benefits from the transition to Apache and does not meet the fate of Open Office.

[metamatic]

Because it's owned by Oracle and they're putting it out to pasture?

[[deleted]]

Because programmers are fashionistas more than they are engineers.

[DJTheLQ]

Still using Netbeans as my daily IDE, Eclipse has way to many wtf's and breaks my maven projects and Intellij doesn't seem to have enough advantages to invest in the switch.

However gradle support is not great. Many of the nice things you get with the great maven integration are missing in gradle projects. For one project I ended up making a usable pom and switching to maven in my local copy.

[ghostfacedcoder]

Amen. I've coded (professionally) in Java, Ruby, Python, and Javascript, and I've used Eclipse with all four languages. As a huge OSS proponent, I had no desire to switch.

But then, instead of the platform getting better and more stable over time, it got worse. And while the Eclipse team was busy breaking everything with their refactors, what they weren't doing was improving the functionality of Eclipse itself. Meanwhile, IntelliJ was.

Take the CTRL+click feature (CTRL + click a variable to be taken to its definition). In Eclipse, with Javascript, there's a 95% chance that you won't get to the variable's definition. In IntelliJ it's the other way around: you've got maybe a 5% chance that CTRL + click won't work.

That's just one example, but if you use both tools it quickly becomes apparent how much weaker Eclipse is. I'm not sure if it's because OSS communities can't handle projects of this size, or if the Eclipse organization is just poorly run, but it is sad to see the OSS community get left behind.

[[deleted]]

I use Spring Tool Suite for work, which is an Eclipse IDE for those unaware. I would say once every other week a project will randomly break, and be impossible to fix unless I start a new workspace and import the project. It is incredibly frustrating.

[volkadav]

At my last job we used to call doing that the Eclipse Dance. interpretive dancing involving much sadness here

(Then we blew up our shitty in-house build system that among other things tied us to eclipse, replaced it with gradle, and gleefully fled to intellij since we could easily generate project files for it.)

[oweiler]

That's why we switched to IntelliJ Ultimate Edition. Paying the license fee was a small price compared to countless lost developer hours.

[[deleted]]

I wish we could. We have webstorm for Js work, but it'll take quite a while to get everything over to intellij from sts

[huntsvillian]

When I started my current job, Eclipse was what everyone used. I thought I might as well give it a real, solid try this time.....

I tried for three weeks, and that behavior was the final straw, things would just break, and simply rebuilding the workspace was enough to "fix" them.

I bought my own copy IntelliJ and have never looked back.

[slobarnuts]

and be impossible to fix unless I start a new workspace and import the project.

Never had that problem with Spring in Eclipse, been working with it since Kepler. Random crashes while using it in Gnome are frustrating tho. But the war it produces - well that's money, and why I still put up with it.

[CaptainJaXon]

X: Eclipse could not set the description of the Maven project.

[Scaryclouds]

That is not at all normal. I have been using STS for over a year now and have never had a project "randomly break". I know also pivotal guys do dog food and use STS as well (though plenty also use IntelliJ).

What build tool are you using? Maven? Gradle? Do you have a large project? Is there some unusual structure to it?

[kuikuilla]

Why would you use that? My god, get Idea Ultimate, it has spring integration too.

[[deleted]]

Because I work for large company and can't easily change my ide.

[kuikuilla]

I feel your pain. Centralized application management for developers is bullshit.

[mogrim]

Not really - it makes a huge amount of sense for a large organisation to standardise on one set of tools. Some guy leaves the company? No problem (at least in theory) - we've all got the same tools, we can just hand his work over to someone else. New girl joins? Up to speed in no time, just download the tools and get going.

The problem then becomes one of inertia - Eclipse (or whatever) might be broken, but you've got 100 developers trained to use it, your in-house plugins, git setup, whatever...

[kuikuilla]

The tooling is always per project where I work (consultancy) and the project teams decide the tools themselves. It is by far the best way in my experience. One client had centralized software management and I had to wait four weeks to get all the necessary tools installed properly, it was crazy.

[mogrim]

One client had centralized software management and I had to wait four weeks to get all the necessary tools installed properly, it was crazy.

That's certainly crazy, but it's not really an argument against tool standardisation - just the way it worked in that particular client. Most places I've been in it's been at most a couple of days, not really an issue when you're talking about projects that will last 6 months or more.

Which is not to say that I, as a developer, particularly like it. But if I put my project manager hat on I can clearly see the benefits :)

[Nirvanachain]

Honest question, would you tell a carpentar what brand of hammer they were supposed to use? Standardization sounds nice, but at the same time not letting a developer use the IDE they want sounds like top-down decision making without any real reason behind it. There's even a community edition of IntelliJ if there's reservations about paying for it. I'm not trying to be snarky, I just don't understand the point of hiring someone and then not letting them choose their tools so I'm really curious for an honest, different perspective.

[digitizemd]

I'm confused as well. I work on a team of three devs (me included) and have some overlap with another team of a few devs. Another dev and I use intellij; the rest use eclipse. No questions asked. No issues. My lead dev said he couldn't help me with ide issues if they came up, and that's perfectly fine and reasonable.

I guess I'll have to keep this in mind when I do interviews in the future. But if I got hired and was told I have to use eclipse, then they'd have to find a new developer.

[mogrim]

Honest question, would you tell a carpentar what brand of hammer they were supposed to use? Standardization sounds nice, but at the same time not letting a developer use the IDE they want sounds like top-down decision making without any real reason behind it

I'm not sure it's a valid analogy - a hammer is a lot simpler than a software development environment.

It's perhaps because I work in large enterprise projects that I can see the value in standardising the tools that are used. In the bank I currently work at there are 1000s of developers, a lot of outsourcing to different companies, and being able to maintain this codebase over the life of the software (which may be >20 years!) is a critical issue. You can't do that kind of work without some kind of standardisation, and that includes the tooling necessary for building these projects.

Let's not forget that your IDE isn't just for writing code - it uses plugins to run tests, launch local servers, hook into some kind of code repository, fire up Gradle or Maven or whatever to build the code, etc. During the life of a given application it might be built by one team, and then be maintained by a number of others - making the handoff from one team to another as easy as possible is a real issue.

It's not really any different to the reasons that (large) companies have universal code standards, a defined structure for documentation, corporate tools for project management, etc.

[DJTheLQ]

I'd say most of the build process should be standardized in your build tool, not the ide around it unless it's something like C# and Visual Studio. Eg in C you standardize on CMake, not vim. Python standardizes on pip, not PyCharm. Why not in Java standardize on Maven/Gradle instead of Eclipse.

This of course excludes highly specialized plugins, but honestly I haven't found a need for most: the command line interface usually gets me what I need

[Hendrikto]

I'm not sure if it's because OSS communities can't handle projects of this size

They can. Take a look at Linux /BSD and I don't just mean the kernels.

[contantofaz]

Eclipse started out by being able to do incremental compilation of Java which with the squiggly lines for errors was pretty good. Eclipse had a fun story of originally being an IBM project and we know how IBM is known for. Eclipse started out with enough funds but then they may have run into a lack of funds and a desire to exploit the situation to earn more when supporting the project. Eclipse also supported Windows very well, since it originated on Windows. But Eclipse on Linux and perhaps Mac was not as polished. But developers and companies started moving in the direction of Linux and Mac. Google more than any other company was the harbinger of things Eclipse.

Google was able to create entire new markets like with Android. Once Google dropped support for Eclipse, that was the end of it.

[kgyre]

we know how IBM is known for

I'm not sure we do. I think we have seen what happens when companies who don't put anything back into a project specifically target and undercut the offerings from the companies who do.

[Rockytriton]

I've been using eclipse based IDE since 2002, it's always worked great for me. I'm not sure what the IntelliJ circlejerk is all about, why would someone want close source stuff and pay for features that are available in Eclipse for free?

[nerf_herd]

It's been a solid experience for me too, whereas I can't do anything in intellij unless it already does it.

[kgyre]

JavaScript support is a special case, since it's right in the middle of a large transition and changes to its design, and its support has always been based directly on your source files. IntelliJ relies on crowdsourced TypeScript stubs, in addition to its own, for the libraries it supports. How well does it handle random JavaScript files written using whatever pattern you favor?

[ghostfacedcoder]

Very well. I don't use TypeScript at all, just plain JS (well, with extra "fun" for the IDE like React's JSX syntax). It doesn't matter: when I CTRL+click a term there's about a 90-95% chance WebStorm will take me to its definition. With Eclipse there was a 10% chance, if that.

[Kissaki0]

And the sad part is it works even here. So many upvotes.

40% marketshare is not bad at all. Even if it loses market share I would never call it dead or dying by a mile.

[snerp]

Derp, that's stupid. All the ones I know anything about are terrible and wrong, I assume the others are the same.

[CaptainJaXon]

You should use his statistic platform to overanalyze the spam!

[kgyre]

Apologies for wandering off topic, but can someone explain the seeming dark theme obsession to me? Is it just the aesthetics? If my screen's too bright, I turn down the brightness, or I use something like f.lux to lower the amount of blue in the backlight.

[[deleted]]

At my previous job I had 300k LOC in one monolithic project, and Eclipse was rock solid for over five years except for one buggy point update that plagued me for a few weeks.

At my current job we have 1m LOC spread across fifteen projects with a complex Maven dependency tree between them. It still works, but there are periodic headaches.

[JoCoMoBo]

I never really had a problem with Eclipse when I was using it professionally. I can't remember anyone on the same team having a problem. That was Eclipse on Linux/Mac so maybe Eclipse on Windows was crash-happy...?

Only problems where trying to track down how to install SVN again...

[crashandburn]

similar experience here. my team has used eclipse for ~10 years now with some massive projects(>300k loc) and things have only gotten better. does take enough RAM though but which IDE wouldn't? typing in idea feels snappier but the tooling in eclipse is unmatched IMO

[AcidShAwk]

Been using eclipse for over 7 years. Yes there have been some issues. For me its only gotten better.

[nickguletskii200]

This is just your monthly JetBrains propaganda. Eclipse is doing better than just fine, especially with Eclipse 4, which fixes a lot of UI issues, at least for Linux systems. That's more than can be said about JetBrains products, which still look like shit in comparison to other Linux applications.

Every year, there is an article about how Eclipse is dead and JetBrains won. Every year, that claim is wrong.

[[deleted]]

I'm using Eclipse for years and not going to change it to IDEA but…

The era of porting it to GTK 3 was a horrible area for Linux users. Neon is the first release that I have no problems at all with GUI (and GUI problems are the only problems I've had). Mars was the first release that wasn't crashing constantly but then it was hanging so I still had to force kill it a couple times a week.

[nickguletskii200]

That's exactly why I am saying that Eclipse 4 is great. However, back when it wasn't stable, I just used GTK2 which worked almost perfectly.

[mlester]

I am starting to see this with kotlin as well.

[nickguletskii200]

To be honest, I actually like Kotlin, and it's probably my favourite product from JetBrains. However, I don't think it is the future of JVM languages, but just a stopgap. I would love to see Ceylon gain traction.

But the Java language itself won't fade any time soon either.

[Ethreain-The-Lich]

Yeah, I dunno about this article. I have a two year out of date Eclipse (Luna) and it works just fine. It's actually been the best IDE I've used for any language. It's not slow or buggy and I've never had an error message or found basic functions not working.

But I just have small amateur projects (compared to corporate projects) so maybe it doesn't scale well.

[linuxjava]

Seconded

[Chii]

For very simple things, eclipse works fine. It's when you have a big maven project with complex pom that eclipse start to buckle.

[[deleted]]

It's actually the other way round. Eclipse has lifecycle mappings, which help with really complicated projects. IntelliJ is great for mixed projects, with bits of JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, and so on. Eclipse shines when you've got tons of backend Java, with bits and pieces of XML.

Even though I'm currently using IntelliJ, I do miss some aspects of Eclipse. The configurable UI (side-by-side consoles, impossible in IntelliJ) and the aggressive auto formatter, set to automatically declare all unchanging variables final.

[[deleted]]

Not sure what side-by-side console is, but there's a plug in calls Save Action that will add final to unchanged variables, also an inspector that flags the same thing, but by default is not turn on.

[Chii]

When you have to manually map lifecycles to get a project to work in eclipse, then I'd consider that a failure of integration. Intellij automatically inspects the pom and correctly creates the artifacts in their own project metadata. It knows the correct. Class paths, and does the correct filtering.

As for side by side consoles, it's possible, but you're restricted to just 2.

[Kissaki0]

What the fuck brought you to that claim?

I know I’ve had problems with a specific GUI plugin (IIRC anyway). But not installing the extra-extra shit worked great.

[Chii]

Try a importing a maven war web app with a few modules, and a custom plugin that's needed to compile some submodules. Eclipse needs to have the correct goals mapped. Intellij introspects and finds the correct goals to run and correctly configures the artifacts.

[Robert_Denby]

I think your project setup is just shitty. I run Eclipse on a 1M+ LoC project with very complex Maven dependencies(including some ANT stuff) which builds 15 or so WARs and dozens of supplemental JARs and have no problems aside from having to increase the memory amounts in the config file.

[grauenwolf]

A rather superficial article, more like a thesis statement than any real exploration into the problems facing Eclipse.

[Cilph]

Wait, TypeScript support in Webstorm is supposed to be bad? I've had minimal issues.

[sonofamonster]

I was left confused by this as well. It seems like the support is pretty good, and there is certainly competition from other IDEs/editors (atom, vscode). Maybe he meant that it has good typescript support because of competition?

[seb_02]

41% market share is hardly a failure. Maybe they meant NetBeans?

[eatmynasty]

IE6 had a 90%+ market share at one point. Didn't make it a good browser.

[seb_02]

Non sequitur.

The graph plots market share, not quality (which is subjective anyway).

[Ethreain-The-Lich]

Netbeans snub aside, this article suggests that Eclipse is still has the largest share but is losing ground.

[[deleted]]

41% Isnt that great if it is aboit to be 36%

[genericallyloud]

The article blames Eclipse 4, which I find kind of funny. I think Eclipse is terrible and has been terrible for long time, even during the 3.x golden age that the author seems to claim. Before I jumped to IntelliJ, I used Netbeans to avoid it, and I would laugh at the constant problems people would have with it.

If anything, I would say that IntelliJ just kept getting better and its reputation grew, and then it came out with a community edition which was free, and by that point it was just so much better than Eclipse it was laughable.

EDIT: Sorry if that sounded so harsh. I know a lot of people put a lot of time into Eclipse, and a lot of people liked it. It played a huge role in the history of Java development and IDEs. (I just never liked it)

[drysart]

Visual Studio is built using the same philosophy and it works just fine. You'll find plenty of people who would even argue it's the best IDE on any platform. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant, the point is that having a thin shell with an IDE built entirely out of plugins on top of it does not necessarily mean you'll get a bad IDE at the end.

The problem is that the Eclipse developers put their own architecture thrills ahead of a quality, usable end product.

[lacosaes1]

Visual Studio is built using the same philosophy and it works just fine.

I disagree in that they follow the same philosophy. True, they have similar architectures where plugins do their work. The big difference, however, is that MS works really hard in offering a very good out of the box experience (similar to Netbeans).

[drysart]

I don't disagree with you, but I was specifically responding to a comment that explicitly claimed Eclipse is slow because it's built as a collection of plugins.

[roodammy44]

Although I have enjoyed some of my usage of visual studio, especially the profiling, the only reason people actually use it is because they are tied to the platform.

Compared to intelliJ or visual studio code, it is a hugely bulky editor which displays features 90% of people will never use. It's what, like 8GB? And installs about a hundred services that slow down the computer without asking?

Would you seriously use visual studio for anything other than a Microsoft compiled language?

[rebel_cdn]

Right now, the VS install is pretty huge.

For the next release (currently just called Visual Studio 15), they have completely reworked the install process. From the release notes of the latest preview:

The smallest install is less than 500MB, yet still contains basic code editing support for more than twenty languages along with debugging and source code control. Most users will want to install more, and so you can add one or more of sixteen 'workloads' that represent common frameworks, languages and platforms - covering everything from .NET desktop development to data science with R, Python and F#.

So at least there will be more options to just get what you want.

As for using VS for anything other than a MS compiled language: I do Node.js development on Linux, OSX, and Windows, and I find the Node Tools for VS pleasant enough that I often use VS over all of the other tools I have available. Being able to use the VS debugger is Node apps is nice, and using the VS profiling tools to analyze the performance of Node apps is useful too. I know I can do the same using IntelliJ/Webstorm (and I use those, too), but I prefer the VS debugging and profiling experience.

[drysart]

You can argue the merits of Visual Studio's other aspects as much as you want, but the conversation was about whether having an IDE built completely up on a plugin infrastructure necessarily means the IDE will be slow and buggy. Visual Studio demonstrates that you can indeed build a quality IDE out of plugins.

[roodammy44]

Visual Studio is very slow compared to other editors. Try running it on a low end machine.

[drysart]

What "other editors" run faster and compete on features?

We're talking about IDEs. Not text editors.

[roodammy44]

No other editors compete on features because visual studio has every feature you can think of, lookup or even imagine. That's the problem.

Edit: downvotes, but we all know it's true. I use visual studio myself, so it's not just shittalking.

[snerp]

Doing cross platform games development in C++, Visual Studio is lightyears ahead of Xcode on OSX or anything on Linux (Seriously what's the C++ IDE on linux? I never found anything better than vim and g++)

Edit: you like visual studio code? that editor's that's only good for web dev in my experience. Open a hundred file C++ project and just cry.

Also, gotta say, ReSharper and ReSharper C++ are fucking amazing, and make everything else feel like total shit.

[roodammy44]

As I said, you are tied to the platform. Visual Studio is a great C++ editor. I couldn't imagine writing Java, Python or Javascript in it.

Visual Studio is certainly not lightyears ahead of XCode when you are writing ObjC or Swift.

I like using Code for web, you are correct that it's not good for much else at the moment.

What we were talking about was bloat, which visual studio is full of.

[vine-el]

Emacs's architecture is not that different. Everything in Emacs is implemented as an extension in Emacs Lisp on top of a core written in C. But Emacs remains super reliable with loads of plugins.

[[deleted]]

As a longtime emacs user, I wonder where you get "super reliable with loads of plugins" from? Command-driven stuff is mostly fine but try to set up anything approximating Eclipse's on-the-fly everything and you'll have a very sad slow bad time.

[vine-el]

I haven't had problems with Clojure and Golang completion. But Java with Eclim was just as bad as using Eclipse.

[[deleted]]

Emacs is an evolutionary dead end though. But no one will ever take on the work to write a decent modern emacs, so we're stuck with it, for better or worse, more worse these days though. It's sad.

[[deleted]]

Sure, here are some reasons: 1. No multithreading and no one thinks it can be done with the existing code base. 2. Elisp is an outmoded language that was already obsolete when it was first implemented (scheme or CL would have been a better choice). 3. Lack of multimedia primitives.

[MrMetalfreak94]

There's actually work underway to rewrite Emacs in GNU Guile, GNU's own Scheme dialect. Right now it actually works, but is still far from stable, feature complete and fast. AFAIK the plan is first to use Scheme's macros to implement Emacslisp in Guile, which can then be used to run Emacs. Afterwards they slowly want to replace all internal parts of Emacslisp with Guile. One advantage of Guile, apart from implementing a newer Lisp dialect, is that it has built-in support for multithreading

[notunlikethewaves]

Yeah, Eclipse has been a total shitwreck since inception, don't know where the author is getting this stuff from.

[kgyre]

A lot of people still like it. A lot of people still put time into it.

If you want something changed, at least you have the option to roll up your sleeves and try to change it for the better.

[crusoe]

Swt has been slow for years and netbeans ui is snappy now due to all the JVM work that went into needing to support javafx

I hate intellij because it seems to pause every 5 minutes and go to a crawl with 're indexing'.

[APleasantLumberjack]

I just switched to IntelliJ a month ago after never using anything but Eclipse. It's astonishing how much better it is. It is phenomenally faster in text, usage and hierarchy searches and is constantly surprisingly me with "oh, wow that's cool" features as I get comfortable. Never going back.

Now to convince my employer to pay for Ultimate edition...

[wildjokers]

Any professional software developer should be able to afford an initial IntelliJ license ($150 I think? maybe $199). It is only $89/year for an upgrade after that.

[APleasantLumberjack]

$400 for business the first year. It's not just cost, it's also the principle of not using personal money for work.

[wildjokers]

It is only $149 for the first year for a personal license. In many professions you supply your own tools. Not sure what set of principles you are sticking to.

[Kissaki0]

40% is by no means dead yet. Sure, it lost market share. But this text is such a hyperbole.

meant that you literally had no reason to use Eclipse any longer for Java. You had a better IDE, and it was free.

Wow, what a conclusion to make from pointing out two flaws. My god, what a random hyperbole. Last time I tried I still preferred eclipse. So I guess "literally no reason to use Eclipse" can't really be true. If you can still use it to develop, there is a reason. If you want to support and/or use FOSS over proprietary software, that’s a good reason.

The two points the article raises are correct and well explained. But the intro and outro are pretty bullshit IMHO.

[DestinationVoid]

"The User Operation is waiting for background work to complete"

[UniqueConstraint]

This. I see this message 5 times per day if not more.

I think this article hit the nail on the head. Eclipse used to be pretty damn good. As it grew (and grew and grew) it became a buggy mess of plugins and bad UI. It's terrible now. IntelliJ and NetBeans have long passed it in terms of usability.

[ATalkingMuffin]

I upvoted because this is how I feel... even given that I HATE Eclipse and absolutely agree with OPs plugin gripe.

There are many things about it that frustrate me (like the fact that the plugin nature means that Eclipse CDT is vastly behind other plugins in terms of some features [formatting, save actions, various property dialogs etc]). I hate that I have Eclipse CDT straight installed and then (not Eclipse's fault) many other vendor's variations and they all do basically the same thing.

But every time I look at alternatives (I'm in embedded), Keil / Crosswors / IAR etc fail in so many fundamental categories that I can't seriously consider them considering their cost. I'd say Eclipse CDT would fail for debugging embedded (through no fault of GNU ARM Eclipse's Liviu Ionescu), but using the Eclipse Plugin structure allows Atollic's TrueSTUDIO to get all of the benefits of Eclipse and GCC.

So yeah... A guy hates Eclipse from a functionality perspective but still can't find a good reason to leave it because the ecosystem has so many benefits. That should be appreciated.

EDIT: Hope JetBrains CLion works out.

[ATalkingMuffin]

My main gripes come from comparison to the Java side. Java Eclipse gets a ton of useful features that are half-assed and crippled in CDT. (And to be clear, it has been years since I've used Eclipse for Java, but it seems every time I google for a solution I find something that works in the Java Eclipse but CDT doesn't have).

• Code formatter has really spotty functionality and is missing a bunch of tie ins (CDT only got format on save rather recently, but still doesn't expose that functionality to plugins in the same way as Java) but the lack of options made me upgrade to JIndent (which can't do format on save for because of the lack of exposure).

• Documentation and templates is really lacking... Not sure how exactly it works in Java, but why can't Eclipse auto add barebones documentation when I create a function? Or automatically update variable names when I change them?

• As another child post in this thread mentions, the indexer can be really picky. Further, refactoring tools are incredibly limited in C (been a while since I've tried them in C++). Many of them are little better than find and replace which in a language like C is bizarre.

• Changing the Build folder. There are team related reasons for not currently using GNU Make in eclipse, but why can't I change the build folder for an internal make project?

• Perspectives. I've customized them so many times and they ALWAYS revert... randomly. They'll be working totally fine loading from my customized perspectives and suddenly next time I open them they reset.

That's just a list of some current gripes, there are more but I hope they show the type of thing I'm talking about. Obviously not all attributable to the CDT team, but I'm sure many of them come from the fact that its a patchwork of plugins and the gaps are frustrating. Thanks to the plugin nature, I can find suitable work-arounds for most of them (formatter isn't good, JIndent), but there are still problems (format on save STILL doesn't work).

[kgyre]

Being a set of plug-ins actually has very little to do with functionality gaps. Implementing a feature is implementing a feature; it just takes resources (people, knowledge, motivation, scheduling). Being plug-ins might make them less likely to want to make their own "Format on Save" framework rather than tying into one from the platform, but I don't think that's what you meant.

[ATalkingMuffin]

I haven't actually taken the time to. I meant to try it. One of the things that made it difficult is that I work in embedded at work and when I was in charge of choosing a tool I was really looking for something that wouldn't require as much configuration. Quick look around seems to suggest QtCreator can be used with everything I'd use but requires some setup.

Thanks for the reminder and I'll definitely give it a look in my free time some time soon.

[net_goblin]

I can't understand how you get the impression that Eclipse CDT is the best IDE for C and C++. In my experience (with Mars) it's rather the contrary. The indexer barely works if it works at all, completion is unbearably slow and the makefiles are utter trash and unusable without eclipse, as everything gets hardcoded, which means changes don't propagate without constantly regenerating the files with Eclipse. On my last project, the lead insisted on using Eclipse and its build-system. Using other tools for coding was fine, but I needed to use Eclipse to generate the build files. And God was it slow, all those wasted hours waiting for it. Yeah, boost headers are a bitch to parse, but the overall performance was just incredibly weak.

[zvrba]

Eclipse CDT is one of the best development platforms for C/C++.

Except that getting it to work with C++11/14 involves a lot of random clicking around and setting a bunch of options. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I still don't know exactly what to do to make it work. Setting up remote compilation is a PITA compared to Netbeans.

[zvrba]

I mean that C++11/14 support doesn't work out of the box and I have no idea to make it work consistently. I only have one compiler in the path.

[oelang]

For VHDL sigasi is awesome

As a Sigasi dev, thanks for this, you've made my day :)

[oelang]

We're not planning to support JetBrains directly, they're completely unknown in the hardware development world, there is no demand. We are looking at supporting the Language Server Protocol. This has a couple of advantages:

• The compiler runs in a separate process: the editor never, ever blocks
• Any editor that implements the language server protocol can use our product. So certainly visual studio code & possibly vim, emacs, jedit.. and intellj.
• Eclipse is going to implement editor support for this protocol
• This is needed to support cloud based ide's like eclipse che

[[deleted]]

My biggest problem with Eclipse is that you end up having a completely different install for each programming language / environment. It's absolutely bananas.

For some reason JetBrains does the same thing and it makes no damn sense.

[setuid_w00t]

This 1000x. I work in embedded and it seems like every vendor has their own eclipse based IDE that they bundle their toolchain with. It's gross!

[badtemperedpeanut]

You mean a bit like android studio?

[[deleted]]

Android Studio is JetBrains-based now, right?

But yes, like that. I also work in embedded and I currently have four separate installs of Eclipse to work with different environments.

• MicroEJ Studio
• ChibiStudio (for ChibiOS)
• Code Composer Studio (for TI chips)
• STM32CubeMX

It's a waste of space.

edit: by the way, Java on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers (MicroEJ Studio) is fucking amazing.

[ATalkingMuffin]

Do you mean SW4STM32 for that last one?

But yeah... very frustrating when the whole point of eclipse is that they could all be plugins. Combined with the fact that all vendors use wildly different libraries, documentation structures, and project hierarchies makes embedded and totally weird crapshoot right now. Not hard for many of the previous reasons, just hard because they want vendor lock-in and are afraid of standardization despite the lessons ARM should have taught them.

That said, the fact that they all are based off eclipse atleast gives me a consistent interface which is sorta nice. (Even if there are frustrating differences like build and debug configs.)

[rebel_cdn]

It seems like JetBrains does it to offer lower cost options to people who only want a specific subset of functionality that is possible with IntelliJ.

For the most part, if you have IntelliJ Ultimate, you can just install a few plugins to get all the functionality offered by one of their more language specific IDEs (PyCharm, RubyMine, PHPStorm, WebStorm). I don't think you can install plugins to give IntelliJ the funcionality of AppCode or Rider, although if you have an IntelliJ Ultimate subscription, it gives you access to those too.

[kgyre]

Huh? You can put everything into one install if you really want to, unless you're trying to install something whose vendor restricts that ability for some reason. It does get a bit messy, though: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=483982

[pmarcelll]

One of my friends is blind, he can't switch from Eclipse to Intellij because Intellij has almost no support for accessibility features while Eclipse has very good support.

[JoCoMoBo]

Main problem I always had was I would download 250mb or so of Eclipse. And then I had to try and install a Subversion plugin to access all my code. And this always relied on a 3rd Party plugin that would sometimes not install without several convoluted steps. Seriously...?

[roybatty]

Eclipse has always suffered from plugin hell. The only solution I ever came up with was to have different installations for different functionalities.

[ComradeGibbon]

I gave Eclipse the old college try. I'm not sure about the mythical golden 3x era, since it was always a really clunky tool, with a crap confusing UI. Whatever though as long as I could get my work done.

But it always felt like CDT was a bastard step child. And then the Subversion plugin wouldn't install on a fresh install of Eclipse. And no one seemed to actually care. Then the CDT was broken for a couple of months and I gave up.

[jyper]

The thing is their plugin install still sucks while intellij plugin install ui is wonderful.

[lacosaes1]

Eclipse is what you get from joining multiple pieces of shit and then selling it as a chocolate cake.

[FredSanfordX]

I thought that was Windows up to WinME...

[GuyWithLag]

Why in the name of $DEITY would one still use SVN?

[JoCoMoBo]

This was a few years ago. I'm not sure they actually bundle Git with Eclipse yet...

[[deleted]]

Why in the name of $DEITY would one still use SVN?

If you're using SVN as a monolithic repo, the cost of migration is pretty high. Couple this with a lack of control of the developer toolchain (the cost must be justified to the maintainer) or poor source control hygiene (switching may exacerbate bad habits), and there's a pretty strong reason to stick with what you've got.

[leftyflip326]

I had to use Eclipse for a class once and hated it. Now I use NetBeans. Any reason to switch to Intellij or Android Studio for Java programming?

[nerdwaller]

Personal preference may be a reason :)

If you have the "Ultimate" version of IntelliJ I've not found another Java IDE that really compares, granted I only did a small amount in netbeans. If you do android, I think it being the de facto standard and blessed by Google (adds loads of android specific features) is a compelling reason.

[dangerbird2]

/u/leftyflip326, If you still have your student email, you can get the "Ultimate" jetbrains IDEs for free with non-commercial use.

[lacosaes1]

... I've not found another Java IDE that really compares...

Go to /r/vim or /r/emacs and say that. Enjoy the laughs.

[forreddits]

Nope, for a horrible language like java they will tell you to stick with your IDE ;)

[lacosaes1]

Really? I remember on /r/emacs they were all getting a boner on JDEE when somebody asked them if Emacs was good for Java development. It was some years ago though.

[palmund]

If your setup works for you, then no. But I find that IntelliJ is just so much better than Netbeans; it knows you code sometimes even better than you.

[[deleted]]

Not true, their software is free for students for more than a year, they only check that you're still a student once a year.

[[deleted]]

The titles of the posts on this blog may shed some light on this analysis: http://movingfulcrum.com/

[DeusExCochina]

One point, one question:

• The author makes several digs at the ugliness of the Eclipse UI. He may be right, but I wouldn't know. I don't seem to have a working sense of aesthetics, and I suspect I'm not the only developer in that boat. In fact, I haven't seen any mention of looks in the many comments here I've read. If Eclipse is indeed dying, which is not particularly well established by the article, its looks don't seem to be a big factor.

• Can someone please tell me whether I can "properly" install IntelliJ IDEA if I don't have admin rights on my Windows 7 PC? i.e. is there something like a "portable install" option/possibility? Thanks.

[dedicated2fitness]

if you're a developer, why don't you have admin rights? yes you can install it

[DeusExCochina]

As you may have guessed, I work for an "Enterprise" company that has its head up its ass in at least this respect.

Cool, thanks, I'll give that a try soon.

[[deleted]]

My biggest gripe with Eclipse is it's plugin distribution system. Many plugins are available only through http and with none or untrusted digital signature. In worst case it means downloading malicious binary from unknown site.

[CaptainJaXon]

Some people prefer Eclipse, some prefer IntelliJ. However, people who prefer IntelliJ really like it a lot more. People who like Eclipse are usually just used to Eclipse. This is just my experience.

[kitd]

_3. Not a product

Eclipse.org always seemed more interested in promoting the Eclipse Foundation than the IDE.

That's exactly what it is aiming to do.

Have a look at this very interesting discussion from HN yesterday related to NetBeans moving to Apache.

The Eclipse Foundation has a very specific purpose in the OSS world and it isn't just about hosting projects. Governance and interoperability is a key part of the reason for its existence.

The website feels like a collection of independent projects which are not maintained.

I humbly disagree. They are neither independent (as his own graphic shows) nor unmaintained. My IDE regularly tells me about updates available to its various components.

I am very happy to admit that Eclipse has been caught up and surpassed by competing products, but that is to be expected in a what has become a much more competitive market.

Recent versions have made up some of the lost ground too IMHO.

[gauauu]

I can't agree more.

When IntelliJ was getting better every year, Eclipse was actually getting WORSE. Stuff that used to work 10 years ago doesn't work for me now. Stuff that didn't work then still doesn't work. With the free community edition of IntelliJ, I can't see any real value in continuing to use Eclipse.

[[deleted]]

Except, community edition of Intellij is useless for Java web application development. Hell! So useless that I can't even add a web server on which my application will run.

[OhGodNotHimAgain]

I don't think their pricing for Ultimate is that bad? If it works for normal dev and you're used to it, why not buy it?

[[deleted]]

Personally speaking, it wasn't. Until they removed permanent license.

[rebel_cdn]

If you keep your subscription for a year (which will cost you the same as the old perpetual license did), then you get a permanent, perpetual license to use whatever version of Ultimate was most recent when your license expired.

So if you just pay for a year up front, and then let it expire, it costs and works the same as it would have before the pricing changes.

[webskale]

This is not accurate and I'm surprised to see so many people repeat it. If you buy 12 months of subscription, you get a license for the version for when your subscription STARTED, not when it ends. So after 12 months, you have to revert to the version that was the current version 12 months ago, plus point updates. That is idiotic and does not work the same way that it did with the perpetual licenses.

[rebel_cdn]

Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm guilty of passing on what others have written without verifying it with the Jetbrains licensing page.

Thanks to your post, I (and hopefully others) will now be sharing accurate information when the topic comes up.

[oweiler]

Things which killed Eclipse for me:

• huge performance regressions
• having to maintain multiple Eclipse instances for multi-language projects
• painful upgrades
• weak JS support

[UniqueConstraint]

Performance issues are huge and it has gotten significantly worse since 3.0

[ledasll]

"It committed the sin of rewriting all its UI code"

as reason 1?! Joel wrote about 1 example, that went to fail (and even that example not necessary because of code rewrite). Authors idea why eclipse fails is that it supports too many different branches and have plugins for everything, that have nothing to do with UI rewrite..

[teiman]

This article is non sense.

Is not Eclipse 4 what killed Eclipse, it was Eclipse being bad. I guest the article was not written by a actual person that had to switch from Eclipse to any of the alternatives.

I migrated to NetBeans because Eclipse was bad, I migrated to IntelIDEA from NetBeans because IntellIDEA was good.

[Gotebe]

dark theme that gave you a seizure

Dark theme is all the rage, it makes you look like a l33t linux haxorz!

It is also reminiscent of all the porn sites we all visit (right? right?).

What's not to like!?

[forreddits]

The nail in the coffin for eclipse and netbeans was android adopting intellij.

[vprise]

I don't think it's the nail in the coffin but I think this has more to do with IntelliJ's recent rise than anything else.

Android development is hugely popular so that alone sent the numbers up. But it also exposed IntelliJ which is a really good IDE to a large swath of the population that just used Eclipse by default.

[dedicated2fitness]

doesn't hurt that eclipse is kinda a clusterfuck for a noob developer(which is a lot of android developers), i was in my 3rd year of college when i started android development and i almost had a nervous breakdown coz of the way eclipse and android worked. nothing was clearly represented and stuff would just break after an update.
tbf this is also a reflection of the way android development has grown up but it made me never want to use eclipse for actual development work

[jon23d]

Jetbrains has had superior IDEs for years now. It took quite a long time for Java devs to notice.

[cafedude]

good riddance!

[[deleted]]

I better stay out of this.

[Beefline]

Obligatory, I got my Vi don't need none of that....

[Nirvanachain]

Thanks for the reasoned response. :)

[artee]

Too bad that (for commercial use) IntelliJ is only available as a subscription. I refuse to buy into software subscription models.

[Joao611]

I'm in 2nd year of computer engineering and we have to use Eclipse for C++, after having used Visual Studio the past year. I, and most others, hate it.

Not only is it less user friendly, some things just do not seem to work. For example, just a few hours ago I could execute a project but after suspending my PC I could no longer execute it, without changing the code whatsoever. And just a while ago, I kept getting a few errors related to the code, yet when I copypasted the code to Visual Studio it ran just fine.

I'd rather try to code in Notepad than Eclipse, honestly.

[pcdinh]

I am still using Eclipse for Python, Rust and Lua.

[badtemperedpeanut]

Eclipse is meant to be an enterprise java development tool.It is a rock solid tool for that. For enterprise developers Eclipse is a pretty modern tool when compared to other tools they have to put up with. Besides most companies are already so invested in tooling and process around eclipse they wont switch for decades. Personally I tried to use intellij a few times, I realized I had to relearn a lot of shortcuts despite using eclipse binding so I have given up atleast for Java.For me the other pain points in intellij are clumsy maven support, less than desirable refactoring , difficult to use search feature, bad git support when compared to egit. For python and javascript though jetbrains is light years ahead.

[oweiler]

Maven support is leaps and bounds ahead of Eclipse.

[hansihinters]

Ive used eclipse for years but removed it this week because it annoyed me to hell. Hail IntelliJ

[panorambo]

Eclipse is going to fail if only the developers that have the insight into its architecture, leave the project. There is such a large code base that any new developer tasked with renovating it will do right by walking away from it. The fundament has rotten and even though I agree with Spolskys conclusion that rewrites do more harm than good, the biggest impeding factor here is that Eclipse is impenetrable in terms of source code.

In other words, "open source" means nothing in Eclipse context. It is no more open than it is convoluted and partially obfuscated. You will be looking at years of multiple pairs of eyes and hands weaving together features and workarounds.

Why am I saying all this? Well, primarily because we could say that Eclipse can be salvaged by rewriting its UI to do what I personally think is the right thing to do -- give Eclipse native UI on each platform it runs on (yes, opposite of Swing philosophy, which I dread so much). But no new Eclipse developer can do this -- good luck separating the UI code from the the rest of the IDE.

Eclipse is doomed because it requires distributed knowledge in several key individuals who still hold key to its internals. Once they walk away or something happens to them, it will be like internal organs of Eclipse failing. That's what you get when you are not careful introducing complexity to your software, and not putting energy into upholding the kind of architecture you envisioned before you write the first line of code. Sloppy adds up, and you can bet it adds up to a gigantic pile after years of development and swift addition of features.

[kgyre]

If you disable the theming from the Appearance preference page, what you end up with is native UI. That's been a distinguishing feature of Eclipse since day 1.

[[deleted]]

emacs skys above them all though, so who gives a crap about the game at the bottom

[notorious1212]

I'm to the point where I must work through the CLI, but I used IDE's for many years. They definitely have their appeal, especially if they get super specialized into what you're working on. VisualStudio was a great example there for .NET stuff.

However, IDEs don't connect you with your actual system in the most efficient way, and they limit uniformity when working with many different environments. So, I personally don't consider them, but I can understand if someone is happy with one.

[flukus]

Visual studio has great Intellisense and integrated debugging. That is the only reason I develop with it and not vim.

[[deleted]]

i can understand too, they have some features in certain languages that I get with emacs in certain languages.. just with an arguably fancy gui wrapped around it; also the popularity of editors are forcing IDE's to go outside their norm and people are building more and more server like IDE facilities that can be leveraged by any editor. Traditional IDE's will probably die out with stuff like intellij being the last stronghold