Eclipse Galileo SR1 (3.5.1): enterprise polish

Eclipse is used as a core tooling platform in big and small software development projects, using various plug-ins and programming languages, all around the world. Scaling is important for Eclipse, both in time (some projects take years), and size. Last month, Google held an Eclipse Day, and the videos are available here. The videos mention some scaling problems: how to deal with lots of code, lots of plug-ins and different configurations. Google is a huge development organization with tons of projects and millions of lines of code. In many ways, Google is the ultimate “Sinatra Test” for scaling Eclipse, and the talks show some interesting problems and solutions.

The Eclipse “Galileo” release train updated yesterday with its first Service Release! Among the many bug fixes are some very nice performance improvements (some of which mentioned in the videos). On my current project, we have over 200 projects in the workspace, close to a million lines of code, and our current (strict) coding policies show over fifty thousand problem markers in the codebase (mostly because of an ongoing migration to Java generics). Being a friend of Eclipse, I got to download the release a day early and try it out, and the results are impressive. Eclipse feels a lot faster now and some obscure JDT quirks seem to be fixed as well. Hopefully, these kind of performance fixes get more attention in next service releases as well, which means we can scale up Eclipse better and easier.