On 07/07/2015 09:22 AM, Sebastian
Zarnekow wrote:
Hi Simon,
after all Eclipse is Open Source - you cannot expect other to
step up and do exactly what you need essentially for free.
Yes, since the very beginning most of its code is written in Scala.
But that is not the only problem. The release cycles of Eclipse are
also suboptimal. Since we don't release our own plugins at the same
time when Eclipse ships a new major version, we couldn't easily
integrate any new features that go to the platform in our own
releases.
I know but I don't expect that anyone looks at these problems,
therefore there is no point in wasting time writing even more text.
This is difficult to explain. Very often I have the feeling (when I
look at an interface and at its corresponding implementations that
are shipped with the platform) that the interfaces are just
extracted from the implementation. I can even remember that I saw
classes that took an interface as a dependency in their constructors
and immediately downcasted it to a concrete implementation (without
any instanceof checking). Generally, such components can't be reused
in any way.
I don't understand the point of the Eclipse Foundation. They pay
bills but refuse to lead further development of the platform or at
least pretend further design choices. But now there is no point
anymore in whining - that comes 10 years too late. Developers lost
trust in the platform and they are leaving together with their
users.
I doubt it, really. Internal issues can't easily be fixed especially
because the people who wrote most of the code don't see its
limitations. Furthermore, the Eclipse Foundation showed in the last
years that they have no further interest in the IDE part of Eclipse,
which is the only thing I'm interested in. I don't know if any of
this RCP stuff is successful, at least it is of no use to me and I
doubt it is useful to anyone else who wants to write an IDE. I can
hardly see any improvements to the IDE functionality since 4.0. The
only thing that comes to mind is a GUI improvement: Quick Access
(the improvements of 4.0 were not even needed to implement this
one). Except, everything in it is hardcoded, you can not even add
your own entries that are not in one of the ~6 predefined
categories.
The first thing that needs to be done before any technical problems
can be addressed is to raise awareness to the Eclipse core
contributors that all of their features may be used by every plugin
out there. In my opinion Quick Access shows a lot of what is wrong
with Eclipse: Dump implementations, too many people with write
permissions to the main branches, no or bad code reviews, new
features are forced to everyone (instead of making them the default
but optional) and of course no awareness that others may have other
interests+needs.