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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I love the Eclipse IDE. It's a shame the Eclipse Foundation doesn't treat it better.

Last time I tried to contribute to it, I ended up giving up. They wanted me to sign paperwork simply to report a bug. There was no documentation about how to build the IDE, which is scattered across dozens of repositories. Maybe that has improved, but I doubt it.

They seem to be putting all their eggs into the Theia basket, which is an IDE framework similar to VSCode. Would have been nice to see that energy go towards improving Eclipse instead of reinventing the wheel.

Improving the UI's handling of HiDPI would be nice. One can but dream.

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Hi, I am an Eclipse Foundation committer, but I am not committing to the IDE itself.

You don't have to sign the CLA (contributor license agreement) if you want to report a bug, but you have if you want to contribute code, even a small patch for a bug you found. That's a legal requirement to protect the Foundation from contributions that may copy/paste proprietary code and to ensure that you will not in the future change your mind and make claims for your contributions. It's not peculiar to Eclipse Foundation, many open source vendors require contributors to sign a CLA [1]

My understanding is that Theia is currently more of a platform than a complete IDE. It is meant to be usable for building cloud-based IDEs, and you can test a distribution on your workstation, but being it a client/server architecture, you currently have to run a docker container locally to test Theia (or at least this was the case in Q3 2023). They are now focusing on the user interface and plug-in architecture of Theia (which is already capable of running VSCode extension). IMHO, for Theia to become really meaningful the server-side part needs to be improved: currently Theia reuses Eclipse JDT and other plug-ins on the back-end, which is fine for a desktop app, but less convenient for a client/server IDE as you will need a separate server-side container running the Eclipse plug-ins for every active user running the Web-based Theia GUI.

With respect to Eclipse itself, it has dramatically improved over the last few years, since the Foundation started making a release every 3 months. You may like the UI or not, but on my workstation it's now much faster and lighter than it used to be, and it's also faster and lighter than IntelliJ. To me the main issue with Eclipse is that it relies on P2 for plug-in distribution, which makes installing Eclipse add-ons a painful process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

I like the Eclipse UI. I just don't like how it behave on high resolution displays on Linux.

I was unable to create an account for the bug tracker without signing a CLA. Maybe that's changed now, but I'm pretty sure that was the case when I last tried.

I wouldn't say that Eclipse has dramatically improved on the last few years. On the contrary. It feels more sluggish to me and it crashes more frequently than before.

The plugin Marketplace in Eclipse is a steaming pile of shite. Installing plugins is an incredibly slow and painful affair. It can take MINUTES to run a search for a plugin, and while it's loading the rest of the UI just freezes. That's a shame.

But given that I can't even figure out how to build the full IDE with its hundrends of plugins, and the CLA nonsense, I certainly won't be investing my time on trying to fix that.

Can't talk for Linux, I am now using Eclipse on Mac.

I used Eclipse on Linux about 8 years ago, and I remember running into frequent issues at that time: the problem was that I was using Ubuntu 16.04, but the SWT widget toolkit maintainers for Linux were Red Hat employees and they were focused mostly on Fedora. For several months SWT was very unstable because the native nature of SWT made it difficult to support it on the different Linux distributions, especially during the transition from GTK2 to GTK3, and considering that Ubuntu was tweaking GTK a lot to achieve its own unique visual style. You can get an idea of the problems the Linux maintainers were having here [1]

At the same time, the release notes of Eclipse clearly stated that that particular version of Ubuntu was not supported. So maybe you are running into the same issue, maybe you are using a Linux distribution that is not amongst the list of officially supported (=tested) Linux distributions.

With respect to market place and plug-ins my experience is different from yours, but having worked on Eclipse plug-ins for years I am certainly a more expert user. As I already said, to me the worst aspect of Eclipse is the p2 package format. It probably solves many problems (e.g. it tries to guarantee that you don't end up with a broken Eclipse instance due to lack of dependencies), but I often think that they could have achieved the same by using plain-old Maven dependencies and BOMs.

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=492371

Edit: fixed typos

You might already know, but for others, installing plugins can become a bit less painfull if you make a list of favorites and install those plugins in one go. In order to make favourites list, you have to open an account in eclipse.org and then search in the marketplace website and "star" the required plugins. example -> My favorites URL - https://marketplace.eclipse.org/user/mbhata6m/favorites

Hey - don't know what part you contribute to, but thanks for the work whatever you are doing.

Eclipse has been my mainstay for ~20 years now, and while I know lots of people probably more authoritative than me will vehemently disagree, I honestly see it as one of the best pieces of software engineering ever made. The flexibility of the UI, the plugin system, incremental compile, the concept of perspectives and the overall stability delivered given how it is built - a complex ecosystem of cooperating plugins - is absolutely amazing. Now I've reached the point of making my own plugins and contributing to others my respect for it only increased.

It's definitely a complex tool and I think the vast majority of people fall over before they get over the hump of learning to use it. For more experienced users, many people still have in their head the image of Eclipse from 2007 and don't realise that it's been on a path of steady but slow linear improvement for more than a decade - another testament to the underlying engineering.

Eclipse started as a "reinvention" of IBM VisualAge for Java and went through at least one major rewrite (transitioning to OSGi). I guess it's the standard pattern for mature code bases.

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