alt Hacker News> 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...
Replies
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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...