Eclipse startup time (Was: questions on PhanTango 'merger' (was Merging Tangobos into Tango)

[Robert Fraser]

Don Clugston Wrote:

> Any idea what's wrong with Eclipse? Why is the startup so unbelievably slow?
> Seems to be about 25,000 million clock cycles!
> (Is this typical of Java apps? It's the almost the only Java app I've ever used).
> What on earth is it doing? (Genuine question, not a flame).

Java runtime _does_ have a startup cost, but the main factor here is that Eclipse is huge. It's been refactored so much that the code is practically unreadable, classes are used for _everything_ (typical of Java, but Eclipse is crossing into Smalltalk-land), etc. This makes for a very modular and nimble architecture, but means there's a lot of overhead.

In the case of startup time in particular, I'm guessing it's static class initialization.