Today the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.
Eclipse 3.0 Final Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
From the article:
Distributions of Eclipse 3.0 will be available by June 30 for download from http://www.eclipse.org.
Release Candidate 3 was just released a day or two ago
I’d like to give it a try, but frankly, everytime I start it up it is just impossibly and unbearably slow. I realise it is supposed to be OK on windows, but I think the SWT thing has effectively made it a windows-only app (unless you have a 3GHz P4).
I’m not sure if it is gtk or some other issue. GTK is pretty slow – the menus are slowish in redrawing (slower than swing, or Qt, which seems very fast), but not unbearable. The real killer is that the editor pane itself can barely exceed about 3fps. It jerks like mad. And every time I twiddle a tree menu on the left, or click on an entry on it, well, the pointer turns into a clock for about 3 seconds while it expands the tree or loads a new file into the editor. It’s no use at all.
It’s frustrating, it’s slower than netbeans I think, and nowhere near as fast as Intellij. Why can’t they just admit that SWT is not much use, especially now that they are adding non-native widget tomfoolery (for example, the curvy and rather irritating tabs they have) and use swing or something so we can have a performant and cross-platform IDE again?
Or should I be blaming GTK for being crap and not SWT? I’ve heard the GTK folks just ignore performance issues, I wish they would try and make GTK a bit faster as the Qt/KDE folks did recently, but oh well.
I think I’ll just need to resign myself to being unable to try it till I move up from my “piddly” athlon 1.4GHz.
“Release Candidate 3 was just released a day or two ago”
so?. maybe they found it good enough and just renamed it final. what was your point again?
the point is 3.0 Final has not yet been released.
the article appears to some pre-release, PR type stuff.
3.0 final is nowhere to found on the eclipse download servers
maybe they found it good enough and just renamed it final
umm… yeah, you’re prolly right
Eclipse 3.0 final is scheduled by 30 June.
Saturday 19 was released Eclipse 3 RC3
And Eclipse 3 RC4 is planned for this weekend.
So we will have to wait 2 more weeks for Eclipse 3.0
3.0 is not out yet. They are on 3.0M3. 3.0M4 is scheduled for Friday the 25th and final is due out the week of the 28th. This is just a press release hyping 3.0.
It is possible that it was released early, but unlikely. First off there is the blurb about June 30 availability. Second is the fact that the Eclipse team has stuck religiously to the timeline so far, why would they skip 2 releases (R4 and final) at the end of an 18 month development cycle? Finally none of the eclipse oriented sites (eclipsepowered, eclipse-plugins, etc…) have any blurb about final being out. I would figure Ed Burnette and Dave Orme, if no one else, would have something on thier respective sites.
I must confess I finally gave up the ghost on the GTK port for the moment. It does not perform badly on my systems (Barton 2500+ 2GB RAM, and a AMD64 3400+ 4GB RAM.) but motif performs far better. Really performance was fine using the GTK port, but upgrading to Slackware 10.1RC2 with the newer GTK broke it. I could install the older GTK but I decided the looks of Motif did not bother me overly much.
I got really excited… for a second…
Although you may be right that IntelliJ is partially better, Eclipse gets you more (with plugins etc) for less money. Of course you pay by having to free up quite a few megs of RAM to work with eclipse, but I’m quite happy using it with my Thinkpad R40 (2GHz P4m, 512mb RAM).
PS: I usually have a few sessions of Mozilla Firefox, one Mozilla Thunderbird window and Trillian opened while working with Eclipse (which itself has 2-10 projects and 15 files opened usually). Works just fine ™
.
How much RAM do you have? I find your observations strange because I have a similar machine (1.4 Ghz athlon) and while Eclipse isn’t the fastest app in the world when opening dialogs and stuff, the editor pane seems smooth and just as fast as in windows. And I only have 256MB of RAM with a couple other apps running.
There’s no doubt that Eclipse runs better on windows than linux.
Obviously gtk+2.x has “issues” on slower systems, but I once heard that Eclipse was slower on linux than windows because of threading on linux. Have you tried Eclipse on a 2.6.x kernel with NPTL. I have no idea if that will help at all, but you can give it a shot.
I have a fast machine and run Eclipse on windows so it doesn’t bother me. I just can’t stand those ugly swing fonts that IDEA uses.
a little off topic,
if you want to take advantage of Eclipse or IDEA IDE’s, you should consider at least 512MB (prefferrably 1GB, it is cheap.) Ram , a decent HardDrive with good access speed (sigh, using a lausy notebook disk now), and last a good graphics card (especially for IDEA).
Otherwise, do not use strong ide’s, use vim, jedit or such.
And for eclipse, it is really becoming a decent IDE, but performance of SWT on linux is kind of bad. i prefer Swing interfaces in linux. And for one comment, i do not like anti aliased font use in programming IDE’s it is blurry and looks ugly. i prefer IDEA’s crisp and sharp fonts instead [especially luicida console 9]
Slow on linux? Ha, it’s drop dead slow on windows – unless you have that 3Ghz P4 someone mentioned previously… Netbeans is faster and is a lot more intuitive (except for that mounting nonsense).
I don’t have such a machine and eclipse is not dead slow on it. It is slow, but I find the speed as acceptable as IDEA’s.
If you really want speed, get vim or emacs, or maybe ms vs.
My computer is almost twice as slow, and though it takes a while to load and isn’t the most responsive program (it takes a bit longer then I would like to switch between views) it certainly fine when it comes to editing text and using the various tools. I also use Linux. There’s obviously something wrong with your computer. I would use the IBM or the Sun Java VM, that might be the problem.
Give SWT/Fox a try, it looks nicer than motif and is much faster than gtk+
http://swtfox.sourceforge.net/
I agree that the OSNews article has a misleading title. I was very close to removing my old installation :/
I’m using Eclipse at work on a P3 800 with 512MB RAM and Win2k and it runs a lot smoother than on my Athlon 2200+ with 512 MB RAM and Linux. I will try the “SWT-On-Fox” Port and see if it does any better.
Do you guys start eclipse like 50 times each day, since your so hung up on the startup time? Personally, I start it at most twice a day, and leave it open.
Ha! 🙂 I’m using Eclipse daily on a P3/1Ghz laptop (actual speed set to 700Mhz) with a slow 4200RPM drive, just 256Mb RAM and Windows XP. (It’s almost three years old.) Yes, Eclipse does pause every once in a while when it’s paging to/from virtual memory, but it’s still very usable. Actually, 3.0 performs noticably better than 2.x in this regard.
Well I might be doing something wrong, but on my PC (P4 2.8) Eclipse is faster under Linux/GTK (kernel 2.6) than under WindowsXP (Home), especially when opening menus.
Well, have I been reading some rant here.
1) Windows does not perform better with Eclipse than Linux. Try minimizing Eclipse under Windows for a couple of minutes while doing something else… Hell it’s slow to get it back up. I guess Windows swaps it out of memory quite quick if you minimize it, to bad I’m one of those who likes to see a glimpse of the wallpaper now an then.
2) Yes, Eclipse can be very slow at startup, but then it responds close enough like other applications. I would always use the gtk version as it is far more eye-pleasing to look at than the motif one.
That’s all I want to comment on right now *pfff*, please be more objective in your opinions the next time. Maybe it helps to install the latest JDK, but I can only say that I have been using Eclipse for 3 months on a 800Mh machine with 256MB ram and it worked without a problem (before that I have been using it on better machines and both on Windows and Linux).
Honestly I can say, I use eclipse on my laptop (dual boot env, it works great: P4 2.8Ghz 512MB RAM) and also use the GTK version on my main desktop: (Athlon XP 2600+, 512MB RAM, Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.5). I find eclipse faster on my athlon by a long shot, GTK is not slow at all, infact I hardly ever start using my swap space! I don’t know what you guys are going on about… The only time eclipse jerks, is when you are using CVS with watch on.
>>mounting nonsense
Actually, that’s one of the things I like about Netbeans as compared to Eclipse. I don’t like the forced “project” concept. I have a part of my filesystem that I want to treat like the root of a classpath – in Netbeans, I can do that with three clicks. I can’t find a way to use Eclipse that simply.
SWT-FOX is incredibly fast, last time I tried it. Too bad it isn’t as well maintained as SWT-GTK. Maybe if more people would show interest in SWT-FOX, that progress would improve.
Really impressing is the performance of Eclipse 3.0 on Mac OS X. Not only is it a lot faster than Eclipse 2.1 – 2.1 was unusable on my 450MHz G3, it even looks like a native application – unlike 2.1. However, you cannot use drag and drop to or from other applications in RC3, I hope this will work in the final.
I have 1GB of ram, and I do use NPTL with a recent JDK. Perhaps I am just impatient
The menus and such are fine, it is just scrolling the text area, expanding trees, etc, it is always very jerky and pauses a lot.
I think I will try the motif version, that was a good suggestion. I think perhaps it depends on your tolerance for jerkiness and such. Some people really don’t find it bothersome, but I just find it really irritating! In intllij I can scroll very fast up and down and between textpanes, which is very good with emacs bindings as I can zoom about different parts of files without having to take my hands of the keyboard and really very quickly. Perhaps I can get the same in eclipse if I use a motif build. I have to say netbeans isn’t any better in terms of speed, it makes you wonder what exactly they have your CPU doing for the 1 billion cycles it takes to expand a tree or scroll a textpane a bit.
If only they’d add a GUI designer a la JBuilder, it’d be more than worth the (free) price of admission. Writing GUIs in Swing by hand is tedious, to say the least.
Eclipse is slow on my Mandrake 10. Not just starting up, but it’s not very responsive either. My machine is an Athlon 2000+, 256RAM.
Netbeans performs better… haven’t tried the latest version of Eclipse, though.
Victor.
@victor, agree netbeans is fatser, has GUI builder, and works
on my OLD p2-333 mandrake 10 system
@Someguy
“If only they’d add a GUI designer a la JBuilder, it’d be more than worth the (free) price of admission. Writing GUIs in Swing by hand is tedious, to say the least.”
http://www.eclipse.org/vep
It produces _really_ good code, supports round trips etc.
very nice.
fs
Slow on linux? Ha, it’s drop dead slow on windows – unless you have that 3Ghz P4 someone mentioned previously… Netbeans is faster and is a lot more intuitive (except for that mounting nonsense).
It’s running just fine on my P2.6 with 512MB ram.
It also runs ok on a 1.2 Ghz AMD PC with 512 MB ram too.
I use Eclipse in win&Slack with no problems, and after playing around with other IDEs (JBuilder, Netbeans), for me Eclipse seems as the smoothest, whith a very fast responsiveness almost everytime (obviusly i’m not talking about vi,emacs ,jed & friends)
It’s running in a Duron 600 with 256MB and, well, it may look slow, but for me it’s fine. (Sorry for my english)
PD: About the original post, 3.0RC3 seems as the latest release, not 3.0 Final
NPTL does speed up eclipse from my experience. This is purely anectdotal though, I did no testing. As far as speed, eclipse performs quite well on my 1.2 GHZ Pentium M as well (512mb of RAM) in Windows XP. Performance wise Windows SWT does outperform the GTK port.
Personally I would set the minimum requirements at a 1 GHZ whatever with 256MB of RAM. Really 512MB should be used when available though. I have used eclipese on a 800MHZ Via C3 w/ 512MB RAM in GTK and it was usable but did not perform well on larger workspaces.
Is anyone else having problems using Eclipse 3.0 RC? with the GTK port and Gnome 2.6/GTK2.4? I switched to Motif because something broke in my eclipse, but hearing people using Gentoo and such I am wondering if the problem was not GTK related.
Wow, just tried Eclipse with the latest version of CDT and wow.. amazing! Everything just works
Big difference compared to one or two years ago.
So when is the RCP Documentation coming out?
I have been using Eclipse (2.1.2) regularly on three different platforms for the past six months:
– iBook G3 700MHz 384MB RAM Running OSX (Panther)
– Dell Optiplex P4 2.4GHz 512MB RAM Running XP
– Custom PC Dual P3 1GHz 256MB RAM Slackware 9 (GTK2)
(I use the CVS plugin to keep my code up-to-date on all three so I can code at work, at home, or on the road.)
Eclipse is _very_ responsive on the XP and Slackware machines. The GTK2 version has been very responsive in my experience and is my favorite of the three. The Mac OSX version is sluggish and often the interface is not rendered correctly.