I have never heard about this before. What exactly would happen to broken code? For example, would it skip the equivalent of the broken source line, or would it stub out a function altogether or what?
I only used that feature inadvertently a long, long time ago. As I remember, the program would throw a Throwable exception when it would enter code that wasn't translatable. There was some sort of hot reloading, too. So you could try to fix the code and continue.
The really neat thing was that the Ecliose Java compiler is built specifically to support the IDE, so all the the warning and error annotations in the editor come from the actual compiler even while you are typing. There is no separate parser and linter just for the editor. I believe that the ability to translate broken source files on a best effort basis is actually an offshoot from that functionality.
I believe that Eclipse 2.x already had most of these features, but it certainly was in almost all 3.x versions as far as I remember. That IDE was amazingly far ahead of its time. Even 20 years later, tools like VS Code feel like a shocking regression in capabilities to me.
Well, regression in that feature set, but it’s better in other features, many of which drove people off of Eclipse.
When it worked, it was really, really good, agree. My experience was that it usually didn’t though, swap branches a few times and the caches would be broken, time for “invalidate caches and restart”. Multiple times per week, each time it’d take an hour to re-index.. that was a lot of time we got back again when we switched to IntelliJ
This sounds like the sort of feature that will show up in a "vintage software" youtube video essay in a few years. I kinda want to go find it and give it a whirl.
Literally that, it would throw exceptions with the compiler error. And as a sibling comment mentioned and I had forgotten -- it would allow for hotpatching code at runtime as you fixed compiler errors.
You could literally start the skeleton of a webserver and gradually add functionality to it without recompiling and it would mostly "just work". Certain changes would require the app to be restarted.
The really neat thing was that the Ecliose Java compiler is built specifically to support the IDE, so all the the warning and error annotations in the editor come from the actual compiler even while you are typing. There is no separate parser and linter just for the editor. I believe that the ability to translate broken source files on a best effort basis is actually an offshoot from that functionality.