Guy Wiener

I thought that my trustworthy Dell laptop with 2 GB of RAM will serve me throughout my Ph.D, but that was before I had to develop an Eclipse plug-in. A single instance of Eclipse Galileo modelling edition chews up 360 MB of RAM just for starters. Running another instance in debug mode doubles the weight, at least. Pile upon that a couple of UML2 documents with their fancy editors, et voila! Half of the RAM is gone.

Why is that? Even the notoriously hoggish IntelliJ IDEA 8 doesn’t take that much RAM. I don’t know for sure how comes Eclipse became the new memory hog in town, but I have a guess: It has something to do with EMF.

EMF stands for “Eclipse Modeling Framework”. It’s the underlying layer that enables all those nice property sheets and graphical editors. Basically, it adds highly-detailed reflection to Plain-Old Java Objects (POJOs) by generating a massive amount of code. This reflection is needed for auto-generating all that fancy GUI, but it requires supporting data structures - And that shows up on the system monitor.

(Btw, if you’re willing to pay the price for reflection, why not use a language that have native reflection, such as Python, and get rid of those code-generated monstrosities? Just a thought.)

No solution this time. It is a ranting post.