Re: [ide-dev] what about doing less?

[Fabian Steeg <fsteeg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I really like the general idea of doing less. I think a lot of grief around Eclipse today is rooted in one of its actual strengths: a large, open ecosystem.

Some like using advanced tools, and gladly work around their bugs and limitations, but others prefer to stick to a rock solid text editor and the terminal instead of using a feature rich editor that hangs while you're typing. So why not give people that option?

On my current machine, the latest stable Platform build (4.4M2) starts up in 5 seconds something. That's not quite the 2 seconds mentioned by Martin yet, but it's pretty close, and it's a start. As an easily achievable goal, we could avoid adding more to that than really required by a given user. And this is not just about startup time, but overall user experience, like tools running background tasks etc.

So as another crazy idea, we could make the Platform (plus Marketplace client) the default download, and focus on making it easy to build the IDE that's right for you from there (one part of that could be the changes to the Marketplace mentioned by Marcel in the other thread).

The open platform and focussed tools that made Eclipse great 10 years ago are still here, but maybe seeing them has become more difficult over the years, and is almost impossible for new and casual users today.

Cheers,
Fabian

On 24.10.2013, at 08:57, Max Rydahl Andersen <manderse@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 11:20:00AM +0200, Mickael Istria wrote:
>> On 10/23/2013 09:38 AM, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:
>>> Dart editor "solves" it by removing anything but Dart required dependencies.
>> FWIW, It's already what Tycho does with tycho-surefire-plugin by default: it generates the minimal application for a test to run. So we don't need anything new to have something similar working.
> 
> Not following why that is relevant ? 
> Tycho's minimal application is rarely actually usable by users because
> it doesn't take into account add-ons that aren't related to your specific tests.
> 
>>> I think for this specific issue (performance) putting together plan/resources to revive or reimplement focus on performance would help alot.
>> Performance tests by themselves are generally a bit tricky to analyze, but coupling them with a profiler (yourkit-maven-plugin) could make them much more relevant.
>> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=420149
> 
> Eclipse already have or at least had plenty of performance tests which junit output usecase specific performance numbers instead of more generic profiler output.
> 
> There were tests for "opening workspace", "load of eclipse", import of project etc. which
> were then tracked to not have to big of a % difference over time.
> 
> Not saying having easy access to profiler data but doing it generically will probably
> not solve end-user problem faster IMO.
> 
> /max
> 
>> -- 
>> Mickael Istria
>> Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat <http://www.jboss.org/tools>
>> My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets <http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
> 
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