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Comment by morcus | Hacker News Reader

> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student.

My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.

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Right, but it’s essentially a fancy text editing environment. It should never have needed anything but barebones hardware.

> essentially a fancy text editing environment

No, it’s an IDE first. Not a text editor that’s extensible. It has a lot of features built-in, pre-enabled, and configured out of the box.

Yes, it can edit text. But it can do a lot more.

And it clearly violated the "only pay for what you use" philosophy. Like driving a bulldozer to get a soda.

Until you actually do any of those things, an IDE is a fancy text editor.

and a 747 is a nice bed until you fly it. Doesn't mean it's overkill and a plane.

That's an absurd comparison, and you know it. Until an IDE actually performs some task that requires more advanced functionality, like analyzing a complex existing project to open without anything cached, compiling, profiling, etc. it is literally just editing text files. The only IDE that I use that takes anywhere CLOSE to the amount of time that Eclipse does to get moving is Unreal Engine. Any Jetbrains IDE, X Code, Visual Studio... all blow it away. I just opened a project in Visual Studio 2022 on a portability-focused laptop from 2018-- from click to the project open screen, it was about 3 seconds. From the project open screen to having an existing project completely open, it was 3 or so more seconds. On an 8 year old, tiny, not-optimized windows laptop.

I remember the first thing you had to do with eclipse was increase the memory limit so the obese hog called JVM could have barely enough room to wiggle around.

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