Blogging Roller: Eclipse SWT is inherently leak-prone?

Eclipse SWT is inherently leak-prone?

This was one of the comments on my Eclipse 2.1 M4 out of memory! story:

Ted Stockwell: Yep. And the more third-party plugins you use the worse the problem will get. You can thank SWT for that. Java developers aren't used to dealing with the mindless drudgery of explicity releasing any and all resources that they use. It's back to the bad ole days of C++ resource management for SWT developers.

I don't know enough about this to refute it, but I never noticed any memory problems with Eclipse before M4 and I am using the same plugins now as I did before.

The other comment on the story was from a person named 'gizmo' who recommends that I start Eclipse like so: eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xmx256m.

Dave Johnson in Java • 🕒 03:05AM Jan 08, 2003

Tags: Java

Comments:

I did...2.0.1. For the longest time I was like "why does it work so nice on Linux but so badly on Winblows" -- turns out I had 2.0.1 on Windows. 2.0.2 is running nice though :-)

Posted by Andy on January 08, 2003 at 12:32 PM EST #

You can download the free "sleak" tool from the eclipse web site to help you track down resource leaks in SWT code. It's not too difficult to free up an allocated resource when you've finished with it and the docs make it very clear when you need to do this.

Posted by Ian Phillips on January 08, 2003 at 01:01 PM EST #