Giving up on Eclipse Juno

In my last blog I posted about my Eclipse 4.2 Juno setup; as much as a reference for me in case I needed to do a reinstall as anything else.

What I didn’t talk about then was the issues I’ve been having generally with Juno. I had thought it was my own installation being screwy, but things haven’t improved much since. The main issues I’ve been hitting are:

• continued modal(!) exception dialogs on certain code completions
• general sluggishness with the editors
• HTML editors in particular that are sluggish

I could possible live with the last two issues, but the first issue is driving me potty: I can get that modal dialog something like 4 times a minute when I’m into my groove. Not much fun… I’ve realized that I’ve started developing muscle memory to deal with it!

As for the performance issues, it would seem that I am not alone, and that things aren’t likely to improve quickly.

So, for me, it’s back to Eclipse 3.x. I’ve decided to go with Eclipse 3.7.2; there is an Eclipse 3.8 that was released at the same time as 4.2, but the Eclipse foundation didn’t create the usual distros, and my guess is that it’s not gonna receive much attention if it has bugs etc. Eclipse 3.7 was working just fine for me, so that’s what I’ll use for now.

And, let’s see how things are in a year from now. If they don’t fix it, it could be the end of 10 years of using this IDE.

PS: I know how this is meant to work: as a user of open source, it is one’s responsibility to contribute back to help improve the product. But my open source time is spent on Apache Isis, and Eclipse is just too big to be able to provide any meaningful help.

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Reference: Giving up on Eclipse Juno from our JCG partner Dan Haywood at the Dan Haywood blog blog.