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Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819280]

Sat, 11 January 2020 15:15

Helen Keller

Messages: 141
Registered: June 2019

Senior Member

Nice , but "help" knows nothing about what it does.
Perhaps just another meaningless "status" bar cluttering the IDE.

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Re: Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819283 is a reply to message #1819280]

Sat, 11 January 2020 20:51

Nitin Dahyabhai

Messages: 3707
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

It's only shown when the "Show heap status" setting is enabled on the main General preference page. As Eclipse is a Java application, and Java is a runtime that uses garbage collection for memory management (reclaiming heap memory previously used by objects that are no longer deemed necessary), it's literally a way to invoke the garbage collector manually.

Nitin Dahyabhai
Eclipse Web Tools Platform

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Re: Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819298 is a reply to message #1819283]

Sun, 12 January 2020 16:47

Helen Keller

Messages: 141
Registered: June 2019

Senior Member

So it is enabled in 2019-12 , fine, don't bother to tell the user.
Me thinks that if I work in C/C++ why is Java getting automatically in the act?

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Re: Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819315 is a reply to message #1819298]

Mon, 13 January 2020 05:55

Ed Merks

Messages: 31159
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

As Nitin explained, Eclipse itself is a Java application and so all of user interface support that you are using to do C/C++ development is implemented in Java. So that's why Java is necessarily in the act. If you don't want to see this status control, you can prefer not to have it. There's even a context menu to close it. We can't tell you why the C/C++ folks decided to show it by default; maybe that's a decision the Eclipse Platform team made. In any case, it's not as if the real estate that it's using is crowded with other things. Moreover, if you see this indicator get close to full, you might consider increasing the heap allocation. Of course doing that is highly technical and involves editing the eclipse.ini to change the value of -Xmx2048m. I'm not sure why the context menu doesn't offer the ability to increase the heap size...

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Re: Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819415 is a reply to message #1819315]

Tue, 14 January 2020 18:45

Helen Keller

Messages: 141
Registered: June 2019

Senior Member

For what it is worth,
this "heap" thingie may be beneficial to some but it indeed takes real estate.
Such as the very right part of the bottom status area does not display full progress path / info.
It has not done so for few back releases since they deleted another , IMHO much better, way to keep track of things.

Over the years of being a professional QA of software , and as a user of free software I do understand the mentality of "coders" . They are just free to do what they do.

I am not going to quote may favourite software book by Mr Alan Cooper, but I believe in it.

Cheers

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Re: Eclipse IDE 2019-12 "run garbage collector " ??? [message #1819420 is a reply to message #1819415]

Tue, 14 January 2020 22:38

Nitin Dahyabhai

Messages: 3707
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Displaying the full progress path / info would work if you had a task going on in the background, but there's no limitation on there being just one. I'm not sure which better method you're referring to that was seemingly deleted, though.

Nitin Dahyabhai
Eclipse Web Tools Platform

[Updated on: Tue, 14 January 2020 22:38]

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