February 17, 2006

New Eclipse 3.2M5: yummy


I am noticing quite a few interesting new features in the brand new Eclipse 3.2M5:
  • Infer generic type.
  • Refactoring scripts .
  • New refactoring:  introduce indirection.
  • Multiple problems of the same category can be fixed at once.
  • The Eclipse formatter can be run without launching the Eclipse UI.
  • Eclipse is gaining more and more FindBugs-like functionalities (null reference analysis, assignment of parameters, etc...).
  • Quite a few sexy SWT improvements.
The full New and Noteworthy has all the gory details.

 

Posted by cedric at February 17, 2006 11:05 PM
Comments

Afaik Infer Generic Type was there in the first 3.1 incarnations - or do you mean something else?

About the findbugs like features I don't understand why the NIH-syndrome is reaching eclipse. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they could just help the findbugs guys to improve the plugin and supply this as deault.

Posted by: Heiko W. Rupp at February 18, 2006 04:50 AM

FindBugs inspects bytecode, rather than source code. For a tool like Eclipse that already keeps a parse tree in memory, that's a rather silly technological inversion, like using a horse to pull a car. You'll just never get the responsiveness that you'll need out of such a tool: ability to highlight errors in the editor, ability to work on non-compilable code, quick-fixes.

I appreciate what the FindBugs people have done, but technologically it's pretty much a dead end. Eclipse is literally years behind the competition in terms of bug-finding technologies (they're just adding switch-statement fall-through detection now!?!?). It's good for the industry that they are taking the first steps necessary to catch up.

Posted by: Dave Griffith at February 18, 2006 06:43 AM

hi cedric,

your URL to "New and noteworthy" is "http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.eclipse.org%2Feclipse%2Fdownloads%2Fdrops%2FS-3.2M5-200602171115%2Feclipse-news-M5.html"

What does this do that a direct URL won't do ?

Thanks,

BR,
~A

Posted by: Anjan Bacchu at February 18, 2006 08:14 AM

For the find-bugs business try JLint - it gives you a whole lot of warnings for everything, incl a quite sophist thread safety analyser. And it has a neat Eclipse plugin.

http://artho.com/jlint/manual.html

Posted by: George Petrov at February 25, 2006 03:05 PM
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