Re: [platform-ant-dev] Ant project builders in separate VM?

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To shed some historical light on this,
I believe the Ant support was initially added to Eclipse solely for the
purpose of building Eclipse itself.  It wasn't initially conceived
as a typical end-user feature, but more as a plug-in development feature
(build.xml, etc). Thus, Eclipse-specified Ant tasks were the norm. We quickly
realized that this was not generally useful for end-users, and had the
danger of creating Ant tasks that locked users into Eclipse.  Here
is a document that was written about the issue a couple of years ago:

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-core-home/rfc/0009/index.html

I think the bottom line is that both
audiences are important (Eclipse Ant task users and vanilla Ant users),
and we need to make it as easy as possible for both. While the vanilla
Ant user is probably the most common case, keep in mind that making execution
in a separate VM the default is guaranteed to break users in the other
group. The current default breaks nobody, but can lead to OutOfMemoryErrors
in some scenarios. My suggestion is to keep the same VM as the default,
but make the option more prominent and explain the consequences of both
settings. Perhaps creating an Ant builder could use a wizard, with the
first page asking to select "same VM" or "separate VM".
 This would give you a place to explain the options to the user and
make sure they are not accidentially creating scripts that tie them to
Eclipse.
--

platform-ant-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 03/05/2004
11:54:01 PM:

> I think the fact that Ant used to be run in the same VM as Eclipse
was way 
> more counterintuitive than what we have today. I don't remember the
feature's 
> history, but I'd *guess* that the only reason we even support it is
so that 
> the Eclipse build process can be run with Ant and use the Eclipse
JDT 
> compiler.