What happened to Eclipse, is it still big for Java developers ??

For the most part, Eclipse has fallen into obscurity. But I doubt that it's competitors work any different in that regard.

Yeah, pretty sure Intellij does the same thing. A few bad lines rarely affects syntax highlighting/suggestions further down in the same file.

Fun fact - The author of this post used to work at JetBrains on IDEs.

While everyone I know moved away from Eclipse years ago, if you look at the stats it is still a very widely used IDE.

Maybe universities still get students to use it?

I hope not, that would be malpractice

However, I wanted to make the distinction that while @systems asked about Eclipse as a Java IDE, which it is objectively terrible at, Eclipse is like NetBeans in that it is multi-language[1] and is likely more accessible as an open-source C++ IDE for university use than trying to get CLion licenses (and, ahem, then explain CMake to students :-/ )

1: yes, I'm acutely aware IDEA is also multi-language but the open source distribution only covers Java and Python, unlike Eclipse and NetBeans

CLion licenses are free for people with university email addresses, and perhaps you can figure out some basic subset of CMake to just compile a few files.

In my experience, university CS courses are always pushing woefully outdated tooling and avoiding any remotely modern standard practices like the plague.

I was lucky to have one course in 2018 in which the professor actually included the most bare bones `git` usage.

I actually never had a class in which an IDE was recommended. In 2008 I did have a class on C (first half C, second half Java) in which we were restricted to using C89 because that was most widely adopted in industry. I really missed block-scoped variables in for loops (`for (int i = 0...)`).

Students should be learning how to move industries forward, not backward.

> For the most part, Eclipse has fallen into obscurity.

I guess it depends on the locale/company/environment?

In most conferences, online videos, as well as among the people I know personally, JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA for Java) seem to reign supreme: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ They have a community version, personally I pay for the Ultimate package of all the tools. They're slightly sluggish, want a lot of RAM, but the actual development experience and features make up for that. Hands down, the best set of IDEs that I've used from a pure development perspective - refactoring enterprise codebases mostly becomes something you can actually do with confidence. Running tests is easy. Integrating with app servers, containers, package managers or container runtimes is easy. Even remote debugging is easy to set up, as is doing debugging, or even testing web APIs. I'd say that all of the features that should exist do exist, which is more than I can say about many other IDEs.

I know that Eclipse is sometimes used more in an educational setting, however there are also both some specialized tools, as well as customized versions for something like working with Spring in the industry: https://spring.io/tools In my experience, the idea behind the IDE is nice (a platform that you can install whatever you want on, entire language support packages, or specialized tool packages), but the execution falls short - sometimes it's unstable, other times it works slow and so on. That said, it's passable.

I would say that personally I'd almost prefer NetBeans to Eclipse, even after it was given over to the Apache Foundation, which have released a few versions since: https://netbeans.apache.org/ It seems to do less than either Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA do, but for general purpose Java editing and limited work with other stacks (PHP, webdev stuff, some C/C++) it is good and pleasant to use. However, if you have projects that get close to half a million lines of code, it does just kind of break and gets way slower than the alternatives. It still somehow feels more coherent than Eclipse to me, would pick it if IntelliJ IDEA didn't exist.

Some also try doing something like using Visual Studio Code with a Java plugin: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/java That said, I only used that briefly when I needed something lightweight for a netbook of mine, the experience was somewhat underwhelming. The autocomplete or refactoring wasn't as good as IntelliJ IDEA and just felt a little bit tacked on. Then again, that was a while ago, I don't doubt that progress is being made.

I’ve been using Eclipse for Java recently and it’s better than I remember it being. One thing I particularly like is that it has a view that’s like the Smalltalk browsers in older smalltalk environment.

That class browser has been part of Eclipse since the start or very near it (I first used it circa 2003).

I remember it being in VisualAge for Java before that IDE became Eclipse.

That's not quite fair. I don't have any numbers, but i suspect a few developers are using vscode which uses the jdt.ls language server. jdt is basically just a wrapper around the non-ui parts of eclipse. Eclipse lives on, although the IDE itself might not see much use anymore.

I guess we are obscure developers, with our Visual Studios and Eclipses.

Eclipse headless is also what powers VS Code Java support, with Red-Hat and Microsoft as main developers.

You know, the reason why JetBrains had to rush out Fleet.

I've seen many people begin projects with VS code and end it with Intellij or another jetbrain product.

To be fair, I use VS Code as well. It works well as a text editor.

You actually could do a lot of stuff in VS Code. See rust-analyzer or our extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tooltitu...

Eclipse may not be as popular as it used to be, but saying it has "fallen into obscurity" is wild hyperbole. It's still very popular, albeit maybe not so much with the SV startup crowd which is so prevalent on HN.

I don't think so (IntelliJ is way more popular).

I think Eclipse is mostly popular these days as a platform for companies offering custom tools. For example Team Center (which is awful btw). Honestly Eclipse was always pretty awful and I have yet to use any Eclipse based software upon which that awfulness didn't at least leave a mild stench.

Check out this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eclipse-based_software

Eclipse the IDE is mostly dead, but its Java analysis was moved into a language server and is the goto option for people in vim, emacs and presumably VSC, though the last option isn't as open as the first two in what the extension actually uses under the hood.

I still use it.

I love eclipse back in its day. It worked great for me until everybody started using Maven.

Eclipse tried to use the same approach for maven and wrote their own parser/processor to inject the Maven build file. This failed miserably.