[simoncion]

I was using Eclipse for a couple of years for C++ and Java work (some of that work was building things on Eclipse) about three years back.

Once you increased a few limits like the Java max heap size [0] Eclipse was a bit slow to start, but -once started- was no slower than any other full-featured IDE I'd used. CDT was really nice, and the Java tooling worked as well as I expected it to.

The two really big issues I had were the really terrible dependency resolver -which not infrequently required you to update packages in stages, playing the "Which package(s) is giving the dep resolver grief now?" game for several fives of minutes-, and Eclipse's tendency to cache all sorts of file state. Once you learned what Eclipse cached, you knew what sorts of things to not do outside of Eclipse, but until then... oh, the mysterious errors one was likely to receive! :P

[0] Rant: Why the fuck is this even a tunable? Every other program I use (including software written with a language that targets a GC'd VM like C# or Erlang) is completely capable of regulating its own memory usage. Why does Java need me to tell it how much memory it is allowed to use?