Re: [eclipse-dev] eclipse sdk v5 ❤

[GIREESH PUNATHIL <gpunathi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

"builds taking minutes, incremental builds not really incremental": thanks for this Stephan, i think this is exactly what Daniel was looking for: substantial and recurring pain points.

Daniel: what do you think, addressing this issue (minutes to build) fall under v4.x, or does it warrant a major overhaul? in which case probably we have the first candidate for the future draft?

on the bike shed: i work in PDE, debugging plugin life cycle issues that require spinning child eclipse in release and debug modes a hundred times an hour, and those 5 seconds accumulate into intolerable frustration. your pain is builds. mine is startups. both are recurring and real pains. neither of us is bike shedding.

i am not 100% sure, but i suspect slow builds and slow startups may be sharing a common genesis - a design weakness in the OSGi classloading model that obscures real dependencies in both cases, loading more plugins than needed. at startup and at build time.

if this is true, we have been disagreeing on the manifestation while suffering from the same root cause, without knowing it. and even if it is not, no harm done; two different pain points - one big deal for someone, another one big deal for someone else.

"one of the last IDEs powered by human intelligence": looks like a resignation or making peace with an ending? 😊 maybe AI will eat all of this eventually and eclipse will become a museum piece. but i would rather find that out after we tried, not before. because if eclipse fades, this question may come up at the post mortem: what did we do to evolve, adapt and survive?

Thanks,

Gireesh Punathil

From: eclipse-dev <eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Stephan Herrmann via eclipse-dev <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, 3 June 2026 at 4:43 AM
To: General development mailing list of the Eclipse project. <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [eclipse-dev] eclipse sdk v5 ❤

Am 01.06.26 um 09:20 schrieb GIREESH PUNATHIL:
> Stephan: i think, the silence may not mean "we don't want this conversation." it
> might also mean "we don't think our voice matters here." otherwise,

sure, many interpretations are possible.

> how do we
> explain your own question earlier in this thread: "does anybody still need us?"?

I wrote: "Second, at some point when AI is fully integrated, does anybody still
need the classical IDE features? Now? In 5 years? (Read: does anybody still need
*us*?)"

With my parenthesis I alluded to the possibility that AI will eat the jobs of
traditional tool smiths. In that scenario there might no longer exist anything
like JDT - because it's no longer needed. Along that train of thought, one
option for the Eclipse IDE could also turn out to be: "one of the last IDEs
powered by human intelligence". I see beauty in that :)

Let me add one remark regarding performance: I don't know why people get so
excited about Eclipse startup time. How often do people start Eclipse. Every 5
minutes? Once an hour, a day, a week? A few seconds every week certainly doesn't
motivate a big architectural overhaul. Or is it just for the feeling to show:
"I'm so light weight!!!"?

This doesn't mean I don't see performance problems, but in my day-to-day work
90% of those problems relate to workspace builds, e.g., when multiple builders
are involved, e.g., when one of them takes *minutes* to complete what should be
an incremental build, e.g., when a build at Eclipse startup (yes) takes minutes
(although nothing changed since the last build) etc.

Compared to these issues, squeezing a few seconds from startup time to me sounds
like painting the bike shed.

best,
Stephan
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