[josephg]

> Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades on our computers because the default company issued machines (which were quite good at the time) didn't have enough RAM to use eclipse properly.

I can't imagine why it went out of favour...

[someguyiguess]

This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...)

VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...)

But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...

[pjmlp]

Definitely, it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace, and there are old Reddit comments of me complaining about in on /r/java.

Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.

[ryukoposting]

> It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.

[GrayShade]

The indexer was probably clangd, not Code itself.

[aragonite]

IME more likely cpptools (which comes with vscode) than clangd.

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332

[ryukoposting]

That's correct. Clangd doesn't churn nearly as hard as cpptools, but it's also not nearly as good as cpptools.

[Alupis]

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content.

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.

For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.

[josephg]

It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that.

They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size.

I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.

[iberator]

16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram

[elzbardico]

At this time laptops still could have memory upgrades, and memory was pretty cheap compared to today. The first thing I did when I bought a new laptop was buying two 8GB SoDIMMs, it was way cheaper than ordering the upgrade from factory.

The thing is, memory in personal computer have plateaued for quite some time. 16GB was not uncommon in 2010. Things are not like the crazy 90s and early 2000s where PC configuration become obsolete in less than two years.

[Alupis]

That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram.

Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish.

Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.

[dragonwriter]

> That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.

[ReptileMan]

>They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

With the current prices it is still wild mate.

[elzbardico]

Funny thing, memory was cheaper, and machines were upgradeable. People used to buy low memory machines and upgrade them with after market memory to avoid paying DELL or Apple's memory upgrade tax.

[morcus]

> 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.

[DrewADesign]

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

[rovr138]

> 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.

[gosub100]

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

[DrewADesign]

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

[rovr138]

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

[gosub100]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

My first IDE was Turbo Pascal 2.0, about 20 years before I used Eclipse, and I used a lot in between (and since). Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use. A few of those problems probably would have been a little bit less noticeable on a ridiculously high-end machine, but not all of them, and other contemporary IDEs worked well-enough on lighter machines. And despite how much I disliked using Eclipse, I liked the idea of Eclipse, and kept it around because it was, for a while, occupying the niche of “extensible open source platform most popular to target for interesting dev tools” (because there weren't really any alternatives that were as open and extensible).

[Semaphor]

I used eclipse in university around that time (2005), then first switched to netbeans which I already liked more, then discovered IntelliJ and have been using that ever since. Everything about Eclipse felt worse in ways neither of the others did, but all of that was still during university (though I now use JetBrains professionally).

[bilekas]

> 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.

this is a huge assumption and also ignores the fact that if it's not clear to users, it's a bad design.

[trhway]

yes, 15 years ago 8GB was normal on notebook. We though started to use it in the early naughts on 256Mb.

>Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content.

of course :)

[z3t4]

Todays hard drives are faster then memory was back then, so it's probably not an issue now. Could probably reparse your entire code base at every key stroke without you noticing.

[ahyattdev]

Modern PCIe NVME drives typically see a few microsecond latency, but even DDR2 latency was around 10 nanoseconds. Memory remains top dog by a long shot.

[pjc50]

We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!