I had to use eclipse the other day. How the hell is it just as slow and clunky as I remember from 20 years ago? Does it exist in a pocket dimension where Moore's Law doesn't apply?
I think it's pretty remarkable to see any application in continuous use for so long, especially with so few changes[0] -- Eclipse must be doing something right!
Maintaining (if not actively improving/developing) a piece of useful software without performance degradation -- that's a win.
Keeping that up for decades? That's exceptional.
[0] "so few changes": I'm not commenting on the amount of work done on the project or claiming that there is no useful/visible features added or upgrades, but referring to Eclipse of today feeling like the same application as it always did, and that Eclipse hasn't had multiple alarmingly frequent "reboots", "overhauls", etc.
[?] keeping performance constant over the last decade or two is a win, relatively speaking, anyway
I agree, that you've pointed it out to me makes it obvious that this is not the norm, and we should celebrate this.
I'm reminded of Casey Muratori's rant on Visual Studio; a program that largely feels like it hasn't changed much but clearly has regressed in performance massively; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U
Java's ecosystem is just as bad. Gradle is insanely flexible but people create abominations out of it, Maven is extremely rigid so people resort to even worse abominations to get basic shit done.