Java > Scala

[Somedude]

Le 04/12/2011 03:40, Don a écrit :
> If you work in an environment where practically all apps are fast,
> Eclipse stands out as being slow. The startup time is particularly
> striking.
> I don't see any reason for this. Mostly when you open an IDE you want to
> first open a few files, look at them, maybe do some editing.
> It ought to be possible to do that within 2 secs of starting the IDE,
> while everything else continues to load.
> It's unusual to perform a major refactoring of your code base within 10
> secs of opening your IDE, but it seems you can't do anything at all,
> until everything has been loaded.
> 

I stopped bothering to respond to Nick Sabalausky, as obviously, he is
not trying to discuss, he just throws his opinions around without any
substance.

As for startup time, who cares really, as you open it only once and
leave it open afterwards ? As Jonathan and I have said now at least 3
times, you don't close it as it's your primary tool. And the reason it's
slow is, at startup time, it loads:
- the GUI toolkit SWT and the interface manager
- the customized interface (called "perspective" in eclipse)
- hundreds of plugins
- the compiler
- your open projects
- all the files that were open last time

As you may have noticed, almost all the tools that have their own non
native GUI toolkit are slower to load. Any Gtk tool for instance. Even
worse when you have plugins. Try to start the Gimp or Photoshop, and
tell me if it's fast. And Emacs is slow to start as well. But who cares
really ? They are not meant to be started 10 times a day. On my C2D, a
fresh install of eclipse Indigo starts in about 12 seconds, with 340
plugins totaling 138 Mb in the plugins directory, most of them being
actually loaded at startup time.
Apart from that, eclipse happily handles projects with 2 million lines
without a sweat on an average PC, so no, I don't think it's sluggish.

If it *was* the sluggish chore Nick Sabalausky pretends it to be,
eclipse wouldn't be chosen as the main platform by Zend, Adobe Flex,
QNX, Altera, Aptana, etc for their own product, there wouldn't be more
than 5 million downloads for each release of the Java platform only (i.e
not counting all the said customisations for other languages), and Java
users would instead flock to Netbeans or Idea, which both have their
strengths and are free IDEs as well. Now Idea (also written in Java) has
a reputation for being actually a bit snappier (at the cost of a much
long startup time, however, because Idea constructs the code index
before opening the project while eclipse does it in background) as well
as having many more functionalities, but I personnally haven't had the
urge to switch so far.

Conclusion on this pretty boring subject: Eclipse being slow is about as
old a rant as saying Java is slow.