eclipsepowered – Eclipse grand challenges

Today I received a post from Ed Burnette he sent to the eclipse-dev mailinglist. He proposes to revive the Eclipse scripting project. This project was contributed during the 1.0 cycle but never got into the main Eclipse Platfrom.

Scripting Eclipse is one of Ed’s four “grand challenges”. The other are:

• cut the memory footprint in half,
• talk to the outside world,
• edit any file with syntax highlighting.

Oh yeah, everybody who knows Java knows it memory appetite. IMHO the memory footprint is the biggest challange ever. We have our own Studio based on Eclipse that leverages several Eclipse features incl. the JDT. The biggest issue is the model your functionallity is built on. You just need a “rich” model to get it rolling (parsing content, building an in-memory model, modifying the model, event notifications, undoable modifications, fast access, search, etc.). There are several optimizations possible (open/close, LRU cache, indexing, …).

I’ve built a general model based on the Java model. IMHO the Java model is in a very good state. It will be hard to find further optimizations without introducing negative effacts in other places. You just need such a model for the fine grained refactoring operations, the smart content assist and a lot more. Well, we’ll see what the JDT team will do. I know they have it on their radar 😉

Ed, I’m up to the challange! Let’s start a community push. IMHO the Eclipse teams are very overloaded. You remember the R21 presentation? 🙂