Eclipse based IDE experience: slow?

[A2]

1. I have used some of eclipse based IDE for microcontroller. I feel them tad slower/bulky on processor compared to IDE which are written from scratch for embedded application.
Is it me or anyone else have same experience.

2. Like TI's CCS is too slow/blotted compared to keil or IAR.
Keil or IAR have way more better GUI, easy to use & more intuitive.

3. Apart from that I also feel AVrstudio 6 slower. They have given some checklist to make it faster if its slow. But again cannot match keil or IAR in ease of use.

4. Also MPLAB IDE seems slower & less intuitive.


Reason I believe:
1. They are not written from scratch. They are based on some platforms.

2. Every now & then these companies try to add more & more features to their IDE, which I personally feel not necessary, other's might find useful.
like Opening webpage inside it, videos , pdf inside it



(BTW I have 4GB RAM with i3 processor)

[Mechatrommer]

Reason I believe:
1. They are not written from scratch. They are based on some platforms.

ditto. anything written on top/dependent of java and net platform are meant for everything except efficiency/speed.

[tggzzz]

For suppliers, Eclipse and similar are very convenient for a company that needs to supply a small function relevant to their product, but doesn't want to poorly reinvent a complete development environment.

For users, Eclipse and similar make it easier to design develop extend modify and deploy large software systems written in high level languages with semi-decent type support. Those benefits are less relevant for small stand-alone programs written in poorly-typed languages with appalling syntax and semantics - e.g. C & C++.  The power of "control-space"  and "show all references" should not be underestimated.

Eclipse and similar are modular so that if you don't need a facility then you don't install it. Conversely if you need a capability then someone has probably written a plugin, or you could do so yourself.

If you can get all you need from vi/vim/emacs and grep, that's fine.

[Christopher]

Freescale CodeWarrior seems pretty good to me (built on Eclipse)...

MPLABx runs well at work but sluggish on my home quad-core 6gb ram machine. Maybe increasing the RAM the java processes is allowed will help?

[sacherjj]

Reason I believe:
1. They are not written from scratch. They are based on some platforms.

ditto. anything written on top/dependent of java and net platform are meant for everything except efficiency/speed.

JetBrains IDEs are built on Java, they are amazingly responsive and just awesome.  I've lived in pyCharm for the last few months.

Java has the ability to perform very well these days.  Architecting programs to do that is up to the programmers.

Modern computers (i.e. anything from within the last 4 years) will run well designed software in .NET and Java very, very well.  It will run badly designed software (of any language) slowly.   

[Maxlor]

Eclipse takes a while to get started. I find that once it's up and running, performance is good though, I don't notice much UI latency in normal use. I've disabled spellchecking and variable match highlighting because I'm not fond of the visual noise those features add; as a bonus, the editor feels slightly faster too. What can be slow at times is code model parsing, but as it runs in a different thread than the UI, it doesn't bother me, and I can live with syntax highlighting needing a second to update.

Eclipse can be overloaded with plugins though. Particularly those which constantly scan the text you're working on can slow it down noticeably.

The smaller, faster IDEs usually pay for it with lack of useful features. They often lack good refactoring support, or version control integration. There's always a trade-off. I suppose it depends on the size of your project what's most efficient for you in the long run.

[ivaylo]

Eclipse can be overloaded with plugins though.

That, and make sure you understand workspaces (see the Tabula Rasa part) - http://eclipse.dzone.com/articles/eclipse-workspace-tips