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Re: [eclipse-dev] eclipse sdk v5 ❤
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- From: GIREESH PUNATHIL <gpunathi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 11:49:40 +0000
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- Thread-topic: [EXTERNAL] Re: [eclipse-dev] eclipse sdk v5 ❤
at this point i want to step back from individual topics, as i think otherwise the top level point gets lost. every time a structural concern is raised, the response has been a local fix:
startup too slow? some JDK flag gives us 20%
lazy activation? add a system property
lingering stale APIs? policy is in place
while each of these is technically valid, they all are proposals to optimize within the current architecture, not helping evolution based on changing technologies, programming practices and expectations.
the competitive reality is that eclipse is losing ground[1]. it is not an option or an opinion, instead reality. AI SDK integrations ignored us. IMO, other IDEs didn't become popular through better Java support but with better architectural choices from day
one. The 20% startup improvement from AOT is real and great, but that 20% of 5 seconds is still 4. VSCode starts in 2. that gap is architectural and is not tunable.
my v5 proposal is not "rewrite everything and break the world.”. it is a request for a draft:
- what the next major version should look like
- a formal statement about architectural directions. with reasons and contexts
- a defined compatibility window for the old path [ example: apple migrated from ppc (p) to inel (x) to arm (a). easily. each time, a compatibility layer ran the old arch while the new one matured. and each time, there was a hard deadline. and each time the
ecosystem moved because it had to! ]
Stephan asked the most relevant and honest question: "does anybody still need us?" lets all try to answer that directly rather than deflect it. here is my take: the traditional IDE shell (the menus, the views, perspectives, the edit-compile-debug loop) is under
genuine pressure from AI tools. they are already replacing significant parts of the classical developer workflow and making many of these views and actions redundant.
Thanks,
Gireesh Punathil
From: Daniel Schmid <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, 28 May 2026 at 4:09 PM
To: GIREESH PUNATHIL <gpunathi@xxxxxxxxxx>; General development mailing list of the Eclipse project. <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [eclipse-dev] eclipse sdk v5 ❤
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From what I recall, the "expected" startup improvement with these things for most applications wouldn't be much more than 20% so I'm not sure how much that would actually improve in that area. Also,
my point was that there may be a possibility to get some of that improvement by supporting externally loaded classes in some way.
If you think about improving startup time using lazy activation, you could try asking Heiko Klare (who participated in that aforementioned discussion) how changing the activation policy to lazy (or
eager) would affect their startup time since they are interested in better startup time. If you really want lazy bundle activation by default, I think the way to go would be creating a system property or similar that affects the default (and if some plugin
explicitly specifies the bundle activation policy, I guess that should still be respected).
However, I don't see any reason why breaking changes in a "v5" would motivate people to do performance work.
On 28/05/2026 06:58, GIREESH PUNATHIL wrote:
thank you Daniel for the link - impressive work and impressive numbers! but pls note that the 20% startup improvement with JDK assistance will further benefit if assisted by eclipse' own re-architecture: probably in order of multiples. for example VS code has
extension lazy loading by default, enforced at the platform. any extension needs to request explicitly to get activated, or else it simply is not loaded. so you are not loading most of the IDE until its actually needed.
i too haven't heard any one talking about moving away from OSGi. and i agree, moving away from OSGi isn't practical too. but OSGi with lazy load enforced at the platform is is different from the current OSGi. lazy activation existed since long ago. The fact
that it hasn't solved Eclipse's startup performance problem in ~20 years is an evidence on the architectural improvement opportunity. in summary, bold experiments would not happen without bold thoughts, and major enhancements (such as fast bootstrap) will
not happen without major architectural shifts either.
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> OSGi classloading is slow due to one loader per plugin, among other reasons. JPMS is light weight and can load classes faster. can v4.x accommodate / entertain this change? even as an experiment?
I am not sure whether anyone would be willing to move away from OSGi in any capacity. If there is a possibility to change equinox to use module layers with one class loader for some of the bundles
(if there are no split packages or other things, possibly with tycho automatically creating a module descriptor for bundles where this is possible), I guess that could be worth an experiment but it would be quite a bit of effort (though probably nothing in
comparison to rewriting all bundles). Since you mentioned startup time here, you might want to take a look at this discussion I created which is about using JDK features for better startup time:
https://github.com/eclipse-platform/eclipse.platform/discussions/2060 However, I think that parts of that may work better with a somewhat stable classpath and it might be useful to get in touch with the JDK team to find a solution where Eclipse/OSGi can
tell the JDK about that in some way (e.g. where these classes come from, possibly one archive per class loader).
I don't think getting rid of OSGi is reasonable even for a v5 if that requires all plugins to change without there being a compatibility layer of some sort.
> - plugin registry loading is heavyweight and slow because all the installed plugins are loaded up front. can we do lazy activation in v4.x?
I am not sure but I thought that at least some plugins are loaded lazily? See also
https://stackoverflow.com/a/17592449/10871900. I guess what might be needed here is making sure that it is actually used where it is possible?
On 27/05/2026 18:01, GIREESH PUNATHIL wrote:
Thank you Daniel! a couple of examples:
- OSGi classloading is slow due to one loader per plugin, among other reasons. JPMS is light weight and can load classes faster. can v4.x accommodate / entertain this change? even as an experiment?
- plugin registry loading is heavyweight and slow because all the installed plugins are loaded up front. can we do lazy activation in v4.x?
there are many ways through which we could make eclipse light weight, above are just few examples.
when you say lightweight is a "matter of willingness", pls remember none of the v4.x releases were willing to do this, and we kept on losing ground. and "we could do this in v4.x itself but havent" has become indistinguishable from "we won't." a major version
on the other hand creates the forcing function and opens up opportunities to experiment.
why do you think eclipse agent project is slow moving? IMO it is due to the complexity of the code base. a light weight IDE would make AI integration seamless.
but from the fact that eclipse agent project is slow, do you allude that eclipse users do not want AI SDK? and from a lot of people don't was AI assistance in SDK, so does the majority of the user base?
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Hi,
> * an IDE that is lightweight and fast. why this is needed? because all the competing IDEs are light and fast. are they more attractive because they are light and fast? yes. This requires breaking
changes with a major version.
Can you elaborate what "breaking changes" would be needed for this? It is already possible to remove plugins from the default packages (e.g. Mylyn) to make parts of it faster and make some changes
to the default perspectives for a more "lightweight" experience (that is just a matter of willingness). When it comes to performance, there are probably a lot of optimizations that could be done without breaking compatibility (which haven't been done yet).
Furthermore (on the "lightweight" side), it may also be possible to refactor some things into different OSGi bundles if most users don't need a part of the functionality and keep the existing bundle with the extracted bundles as dependencies to preserve compatibility.
> * an IDE that AI assistants can easily integrate into. major LLM SDKs build first class integrations for other IDEs. AI assisted development is the new baseline and when we don't have a credible
AI story. developers switch IDEs and do not return. and we can't do modern AI integration cleanly onto a 20 year old plugin architecture. This requires breaking changes with a major version.
I think the Eclipse Agents (https://github.com/eclipse-agents/eclipse-agents/)
proposal/project already does that but there isn't sufficient interest to actually put it forward. I don't see any reason why any of this would require any breaking changes.
What exactly are the APIs you need to make breaking changes for and how "breaking" are they? How would you get most of the existing plugins working with v5 (including ones that may not be maintained)?
Could you point out what deprecated APIs (or design decisions) are actually causing the issues you mentioned? From what I can see, both of the issues are things that could be addressed without major breaking changes but I don't feel like having a v5 in sight
will make people more willing to implement these things. I think the main problem is not being bound by staying on v4 but by the development capacity for improvements. And if minor removals are needed, these are probably still possible.
That being said, there are a lot of people who don't want AI assistents at all on their systems. Building the tools they use around AI assistents would likely cause annoyances for those people.
Yours,
Daniel
On 27/05/2026 15:37, GIREESH PUNATHIL via eclipse-dev wrote:
thanks Aleks for the links. the incremental API removal policy looks good. i did some random search and found APIs that are 15+ years old living with deprecated tag. if the policy is working smoothly, why are some of those APIs still present? i guess the answer
is API removal is hard when they are fused into the core design of the IDE.
and that was just one item from the list of concerns (breaking changes accumulating over time, exponentially harder for future migrations, introduction of awkward workarounds...) i raised.
to me, what are the compelling case for v5? what are things that cannot be developed without breaking v4?
* an IDE that is lightweight and fast. why this is needed? because all the competing IDEs are light and fast. are they more attractive because they are light and fast? yes. This requires breaking changes with a major version.
* an IDE that AI assistants can easily integrate into. major LLM SDKs build first class integrations for other IDEs. AI assisted development is the new baseline and when we don't have a credible AI story. developers switch IDEs and do not return. and we can't
do modern AI integration cleanly onto a 20 year old plugin architecture. This requires breaking changes with a major version.
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i want to resume this discussion , but i lost the old mail thread (more than an year old), hope the title will help sync with the thread in the email discussion archive.
what do people think about moving to v5?
i strongly support this.
What would be the driving new feature/api/design for v5? If such a development is happening yet - it would better be shared with the community so more context could be put in the discussion.
At least I'm not aware of anything like that.
if backward incompatibility and ecosystem breakage is a concern, the one time manual efforts for migration is now drastically reduced with several AI tools available.
on the other hand, if we don't move, breaking changes accumulate over time, making it exponentially harder for future migrations, while code gets filled with awkward workarounds, old APIs still linger while better designs are possible....
That's totally not the case:
Are you actually looking for the "marketing" effect of v5? I ask as so far I fail to spot any technical reason for v5.
