When I heard that Fedora Core 2 was going to include natively-compiled Eclipse, I was excited since I’d wanted to try Eclipse for quite a while but had never been able to make it work. Unfortunately the native Eclipse didn’t actually make it into FC2 or even FC3, but it is part of the forthcoming FC4.
I’m running Fedora Core 4 Test 3 on an Athlon 64 3500+ with 1 GB of RAM, so I thought I’d give the native Eclipse a try, along with CDT for C development. I haven’t done much with it yet, but the feature set seems quite nice. I use SCons instead of make, so I wanted to try the SConsBuilder plugin, but there isn’t yet a version for Eclipse 3. I installed the Subclipse plugin for use with the Subversion configuration management system, but I haven’t yet figured out how to use it.
The big problem is that Eclipse is mind-numbingly slow. Even just right-clicking on a source file takes a long time to bring up a context menu. If it’s this slow when natively compiled on an Athlon 64, I can’t even imagine what running a non-native version must be like. How can anyone find this useful?