Eclipse 3.6 Helios is here | Hacker News Reader

Eclipse 3.6 Helios is here

eclipse.org

58 pointsUncle_Sam17 comments

Release notes? New features? Er, nope - Eclipse.org is a case study in how making software into abstract 'products and platforms' has the potential to make it so vague that you could be, in fact, downloading anything at all, which constitutes a subproject of the Eclipse project platform, which I assume is a hamburger.

I hate searching the eclipse site for any kind of information that actually pertains to eclipse. It is that bad.

I will admit it would be nice to have a single list of "release notes" but there are like 30 various projects and some 20+ million lines of code getting released all at once. Keep track of all of that at once, let alone at detail fine enough to be useful would be difficult.

As a result they have been doing a "blogathon" where various community members are posting whats new, etc. On the main page of eclipse.org I clicked on blogathon.

On the page that comes up (http://eclipse.org/helios/blogathon/reviews.php): Eclipse Helios: What’s New in JDT Top 10 Eclipse Helios Features Let’s See What’s New in Eclipse 3.6 Git Support, Top Eclipse Helios Feature #2 New and noteworthy in Helios (Eclipse 3.6) etc, etc etc.

Just have to pick some and read them.

I had trouble finding any useful information on the landing page. EclipseSource did a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new features, which at least gives me some idea:

http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2010/06/23/top-10-eclipse-hel...

Here you go http://www.bigsoft.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/10/15/eclipse-3...

Thanks! This was remarkably hard to find, for a piece of software that's only released once a year.

Does anyone know why Eclipse is dog-slow on OS X? crappy JVM implementation or something else.

On Linux 32bits and 64bits it is faster than Galileo. (Seems faster and uses less memory)

Has anyone had any issues switching? I just got galileo up and running to my specs. I would hate to change environments for memory benefits and then get bogged down in version minutia.

Not sure which OS you are using, but at least on Windows, different versions of Eclipse can live side-by-side in different directories. So you should be able to test drive a new version without messing up your old version (might want to try setting up a different workspace while experimenting though).

True, I meant compatibility with the existing plugins out there though, Maven, Subversion, PDT+debugger, PyDev, etc. Should have been clearer on that point.

Seems pretty fast on my low-end previous-gen mac mini.

How much RAM do you have?

I had performance issues running on Leopard. Changing to Java 1.6 seemed to improve things.

I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard, and am eager to see if things (with Helios) have improved. I'll post an update later tonight.

Try increasing the ram limit in eclipse.ini. It's really stupid.

Find eclipse.app

right click and choose Show Package Contents

Contents->MacOS->eclipse.ini

change this line: -Xmx256m to something like -Xmx512m

More memory will help, but just as important is adjusting the garbage collection algorithm and disabling the unnecessarily paranoid class verification that java does:

http://davidsalter.co.uk/blog/?p=332

Here's mine:

-XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:CMSIncrementalMode -XX:CompileThreshold=100 -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -Xverify:none -Xms1650m -Xmx1650m

Edit: Yeah, 1650m is way more memory than I really need. I'm just fortunate enough to have 8G in this machine so I had plenty to spare.

Edit again: I use emacs in Terminal to edit /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.inito add these parameters

I am curious whether the final release is as buggy as the Europe and Galileo releases were. With Eclipse, you should always wait for 3.X.1 ;)

I only use the CDT package, but it appears to be completely stagnating. Helios ships with CDT version 7.0, which is a new major version of the C/C++ development tools. But as far as I can see, there's barely enough in there to justify a new minor version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com