kdevelop (Re: Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4)

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Friday 27 January 2006 20:14, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
>
> It's also slow with these functions disabled. Enabling them makes it
> unusable (on a 2 GHz CPU with 512 MB RAM).

512MB ? Hello ? That's half the heap size I set to the Java VM it's running 
under at work. With a setup like this Eclipse will spend most of its time 
GCing.

> Once upon a time people claimed that windows is slow and huge and bloated,
> and nowadays open source software requires a CPU > 2 GHz and at least 1 GB
> RAM to (basically) edit some text files ?

Sorry but if you think an IDE nowadays is merely for "editing some text 
files", you're a bit behind the times. Features like intelligent completion, 
refactoring, etc... take a lot of memory, there's no way around it.

> swap back in when not used for some time (on windows). KDevelop OTOH is
> usable on a PIII 450 MHz and 256 MB RAM.

And vi on a P90 75MHz and 16MB RAM, but it doesn't do half of what kdevelop 
does. Please, this is an old and tired song which is replayed for each new 
level of features in an editor. Using something like Eclipse on a 512MB 
machine is pointless, that doesn't make Eclipse any less efficient for 
development.

Bottom line is that the amount of effort required to turn Eclipse into a good 
KDE IDE is very small compared to the one required for putting KDevelop even 
halfway close to the feature level of Eclipse.

-- 
Guillaume.
http://www.telegraph-road.org