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

[Darin Wright <Darin_Wright@xxxxxxxxxx>]

For 3.0, we intend to leave external tool builders as are. That is, they 
will run in the same VM as Eclipse, by default. This was the default in 
2.1, as running in a seperate VM was not supported before 3.0. Since 
external tool builders are an advanced feature, this feels like the safest 
decision to make - to avoid breaking downstream tools that may depend on 
this feature.

Darin




John Arthorne/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA 
Sent by: platform-ant-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
03/08/2004 09:51 AM
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Re: [platform-ant-dev] Ant project builders in separate VM?







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.