Help in writing a IDE.

Question

Hi All,

I m embarking on a difficult journey to create/replace a IDE for one of the middleware products from Bigblue.

Thy have created a IDE based on eclipse and Its a PIA to use it and very very slow even on decent configuration machine. Problem is there is no alternative to this.But i m planning to create one. So to start off i need to write a GUI in C++. I m planning to use Qt for this. But i need to understand how eclipse generate aritifacts and such. There are some graphical elements in Eclipse IDE used by bigblue. I need to create exacltly those graphical elements in my IDE.

So its basically writing a eclipse IDE only in C++ , but for the middle ware product only.

Any guidance , suggestions are most welcome.

I know i might fail in this endeavor, but I would rather try and fail than just to complain about how slow the IDE is.

Thanks all.

Edit : I have been using the Eclipse IDE for 5 years provided by bigblue and its dead slow, I have to use their version because it has customized environment for middleware tool. I m finally tired of it. :(

Answer 1

Eclipse is a wonderful "platform" for developing our own IDE. That way you don't need to worry too much about the mundane things and you can focus on what sets your IDE apart. A good place to start is the Eclipse Languages IDE

Answer 2

Write a better Eclipse plugin? 

Eclipse by itself isn't slow, and Java is fairly fast, so I have to think you would win by simply doing a better Eclipse plugin.

If you don't believe me or if I'm wrong then I have to think the back-up plan is to write a plugin for a different IDE.

Even VS has third-party plug-ins.

Answer 3

You can try to optimize your running environment.

1. Buy more RAM! A development machine for Eclipse should have 4 GB RAM. Working with less is a waste of time.

2. Optimize your Eclipse JVM parameters - lots of articles on that subject.

3. I found that Eclipse works more smoothly on Mac OS X and Linux boxes than on Windows. My guess is that it is probably due to the superior memory management of Unix based OSs. Personally, I often find myself running 2-3 instances of Eclipse on OS X and they are all running just fine.

Answer 4

The only practical way to approach the problem as described in the OP is to write your IDE features as an extension to an existing IDE framework. For a full-featured IDE, you'll probably be starting with one of the following:

• Eclipse
  • Cross-platform
  • Extensions written in Java
• Visual Studio
  • Windows-only
  • Extensions written in a .NET language and/or C++

If you write your own IDE from scratch, you'll spend all your time working on the core IDE and end up with a product not nearly as good as one based on an existing IDE. Use a profiler to guide your work and you'll find the extension plenty fast enough.

Answer 5

Do not judge the entire Eclipse ecosystem by your experience with a single IDE based on it. The Eclipse platform is not slow in itself and modern JVMs are pretty efficient (although a little memory hungry). If the IDE you are forced to use is slow and badly designed, it is probably due to that particular IDE, and not because of Eclipse itself.

I have quite a few years of experience designing and implementing IDEs, and I can tell you that if you embark on writing your own IDE, you will need at least 3-4 people just to keep it up with the feature set found in Eclipse/Visual Studio/etc. If you write it only for your own use, you will find that you get very little time over to do real work.