Eclipse IDE

What hackers pick instead

• JetBrains IDEsLong-time developers praise JetBrains IDEs for deep code intelligence, refactoring, navigation and debugging, but critics cite heavy resource use, buggy recent updates and clumsy AI integration.233recommend
• IntelliJ IDEAThe go-to IDE for Java and Kotlin, praised for built-in refactoring, code navigation and JVM debugging; the common complaint is heavy memory and resource use.206recommend
• Microsoft Visual StudioA full Windows IDE praised for its powerful C++ and C# debugger, code navigation and productive WinForms tooling, though many find it slow, bloated and pushy with Copilot.165recommend
• DelphiRecommended for building native Windows desktop apps very quickly with a visual drag-and-drop designer, though critics complain about aggressive licensing and a company that lost its way.126recommend
• XcodeApple's free IDE, praised by long-time users for strong debugging tools and steadily improving AI agent support, though many find it buggy and tied to recent Macs and macOS.100recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 125 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Eclipse has been thriving since 2002 mostly by virtue of being able to coordinate developers via plugin's and a business-friendly license.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “DeepSeek Harness”

2. Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)”

3. the only good case that Red-Hat sponsored was to compile Eclipse, which was usually slower than using the JIT anyway

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Implementation of a Java Processor on a FPGA (2016)”

4. Managing views in eclipse like this is one of the things that keeps me using eclipse.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Bonsplit – tabs and splits for native macOS apps”

5. Eclipse's C++ support and refactoring actually worked reasonably well on Blobstore

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

6. the tooling (IntelliJ and Eclipse) do not have competitors in other languages

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Netflix uses Java – 2026 Edition [video]”

7. it was easier to customize it to something close to perfect for me

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible”

8. get the same IDE capabilities for code searching in Java, C#, C++

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “The future of code search is not regex – 100x faster than ripgrep”

9. I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

10. The 2009 version of Eclipse was more stable than modern XCode.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding”

11. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I switched from VSCode to Zed”

12. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)”

13. its also the only view that makes writing java tolerable

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough”

14. Java would have been nearly impossible otherwise

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “I program without syntax highlighting”

15. eclipse IDE is more memory friendly than Chrome

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Java is memory efficient [audio]”

16. Eclipse puts more emphasis on being a platform which means you have to download and configure plugins just to get started.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

17. Contrast that to Eclipse and Visual Studio (not vsCode) and it's clear why the larger IDE's are falling out of favour.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

18. I've use eclipse many times in the past, and hated every second of it. Stupid defaults, very stupid defaults.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot”

19. Eclipse, at least for me, quickly became relegated to increasingly rare moments of Linux development.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

20. Eclipse is... Fine for Java in the sense Visual Studio is for dotnet. But man can they both be slow.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

21. VS, Intellij, Eclipse, and vscode had plugins for it and all of them are from the 2015-2018 time.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Zed: Delta”

22. Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

23. I haven't seen it in like half a decade or more, and that certainly doesnt make me sad.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “I completed 100 Days of Java over 5 years and mapped the journey as a graph”

24. how much of a mess Eclipse was where so much was just loosely fitting together plugins

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “You said no MCP”

25. I didn't use Eclipse for many years, but from my memory it was super-heavyweight.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

26. I also bothered to learn the standard keybindings of the most popular IDEs of my kind of work (intellij, eclipse, netbeans, vs code).

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Productivity Mirage”

27. Every IDE I've used just worked out of the box, be it Visual Studio, Eclipse, or anything using the language server protocol.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system”

28. Older IDEs using sdks like Swing, JWT, QT, GTK etc. allowed user to design its user interface using drag and drop.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why TUIs Are Back”

29. Google had hired some original Eclipse devs who did an awesome job making Eclipse work at Google scale

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

30. It was free and it gave cool sexy features that all the cool kids who could afford Visual Studio had

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Cursor 3”

31. I'm a huge fan of Eclipse (yes, that one) and use it heavily for my C++ and Python projects

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “What Zig felt like, coming from Rust”

32. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Programming peaked”

33. I've also used Eclipse in the past but almost exclusively used vscode in recent years.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

34. its codebase stems from VisualAge before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Google Antigravity”

35. waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

36. was blown away but just how snappy, quick and, utlimately, enjoyable it was

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Swift is a more convenient Rust”

37. it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

38. once you get over the shock and learn them really are amazing tools

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal”

39. VSCode never made it past the first 10% of what Eclipse did (does).

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

40. Eclipse and IntelliJ can do much more OOTB than VS Code can.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Some software bloat is OK”