13 May 2005 brouhaha   » (Journeyer)

First impression of Eclipse

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?

Finally a new release of Nonpareil

I released version 0.61 of Nonpareil last night. Now it has support for the HP-16C "Computer Scientist" calculator, and due to bug fixes the HP-34C, HP-37E, HP-38E, and HP-38C finally work correctly.

The big news is that there is finally support for saving and restoring the calculator state, so there is finally "Continuous Memory", even for calculators that didn't actually have that as a hardware feature.

The state save uses compressed XML files thanks to libxml2.

This is also the first release that builds with SCons instead of make.

I had to solve a tricky memory corruption bug to get this release ready. One of my data structures was being corrupted. I used GDB to set a hardware watchpoint on a field of the structure, but the watchpoint never tripped, even though the field did get changed! Possibly a problem with 64-bit GDB in Fedora Core 4 test 2.

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