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Well, I disagree with his conclusion, but that's his perogative. What really gets me is he persists the (rather large) misconception that IBM is "the company" behind Eclipse.

IBM IS the company behind Eclipse. They started the Eclipse project in order to get others to code the replacement for VisualAge for them.
I think IBM was as surprised as anyone else that it took off like it did and even their own competitors started banging at the gates, asking to be allowed to spend money and effort on the product.

Maybe IBM is no longer the sole deciding power in the Eclipse project, but they are the founders and still have lots of influence (they do pay most of the bill...).

For details on how eclipse foundation is run, see http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/

Also checkout the organization's by-laws at: http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/

For a list of strategic members: http://www.eclipse.org/membership/members/strategic.php

I have been looking for a budget report that shows how much of the bill each member pays. Didn't find one. So I'm left to wonder, where did you get this information that they pay most of the bill?

Thanks,
John

Kind of offtopic, but I would like to know what language was IntelliJ written in.

it's pure java stuff

hchaudh1: Errr... Java :)

@daniel,

Well they fund and employ 90% of the developers, I'd say he has a point.

Not even close to 90%. If we were just looking at SWT or maybe just the RCP core then 90% might be a fair number. But Eclipse is a lot bigger than that.

I imagine that a fair bit of the work goes on in SWT and the core, and without them, no-one else can do anything. I can't say whether this is 90% or not, but the truth is, Eclipse is an IBM project; this is why I'm always surprised to find each version is still slower and less stable than IDEA.

Knowing it's IBM I'm hardly surprised it's slower and less stable than IDEA.
I've worked with IBM products enough to expect nothing else than their products to be rather unstable memory hogs.

There's a running half-joke saying that IBM stands for "Insert Bigger Memory" and the fact that I need 2GB to run Eclipse with the same codebase that IDEA runs smoothly with 256MB is rather telling...

I wonder why you need 2GB of mem with Eclipse, I'm working on a sufficiently BIG code base (few mn lines, 20k+ resources) which just works fantastic with only 1gig. It's unbelievable that IDEA can occupy considerably low mem with equivalent content.

SWT is but one small part of Eclipse. There are dozens of Eclipse Sub-Projects http://www.eclipse.org/projects/

Sorry - added reply to the wrong message

I have used intellij about 4 years now, because everybody else in my company is using it. However i will probably switch to eclipse, reason is that hotswap class reloading is slow in intellij. It takes ~10 seconds in my really fast machine to reload class after little change. I tried it in eclipse and it reloaded class immediately, did not noticed any delay. This slow class reloading in intellij makes me really angry, it gets more and more irritating over time.

Kunnar,

I hope the news will make your day. This hotswap problem has been already solved, and a quick hotswap will appear within the nearest couple of weeks, in version 6.0.5. Just stay tuned ,and give it try when it's out. I'm sure you will feel happier ;-)

@hchaudh1 - IntelliJ is written in Swing

I'm +1 for the Eclipse is run by IBM comment. If IBM left tomorrow, and some other very large corporation didn't come to replace them, I think a lot of us would wonder about its future. That being said; Eclipse is big enough now that it may be able to stand on its own 2 feet should such a thing occur. But it's not a gimme neither.

IntelliJ straight out of the box is much better then Eclipse straight out of the box, hands down. Eclipse as a java IDE only starts to get competitive if you install MyEclipse or something similar...