[olug] The Joy of Vim (was: Perl Debugger)

[William E. Kempf]

Justin said:
> I would definitely say eclipse beats vim for any java work. It does have
> some features that do simple things for you, but they are not forcefully
> in your way. Plus, they wrote their own version of AWT, SWT, because
> swing sucks. How cool is that?

It *almost* makes Java client side GUI applications usable ;).

Ever run Eclipse on a Windows machine and bring up the task manager to
look at memory consumption?  Eclipse's JVM always is at the top of the
list, no matter what other programs I run (including VisualStudio.NET),
and by a large margin.  More interesting, the memory consumption continues
to climb up ever so slowly, even though Eclipse is sitting in the
background doing nothing.  Now minimize Eclipse.  Whoa... the memory
consumption has dropped hundreds of MB down to a few K!  Maximize it and
it will jump back up to over 100 MB, but you'll still have trimmed a lot
of fat... at least temporarily... until you actually do something with it
again, or let it run long enough for the slow but steady increase to catch
up!

This is all due to the broken specification of the Java GC engine, and
programmers believing Sun that a GC means you don't have to manage memory,
and thus the Java libraries contain numerous memory leaks.  All leads to
even the best Java applications, such as Eclipse, where the developers are
smart and work hard for usability and performance, still ending up with an
application that's such a hog on the machine that there's times it will
make you want to chuck the whole thing in the nearest lake.

-- 
William E. Kempf