eclipse: not platform independent ???

[Joseph Sweet]

Hi to all:

Didn't Eclipse use to be platform independent ??? Same binaries for windows, linux, solaris......?

After all it is written in Java isn't it?

So how come they now have different downloads for each operating system?

[Ilja Preuss]

They always had. SWT needs different native libraries for different operating systems.

[Joseph Sweet]

But can it not do this with the same bytecode?
Or should it not be able to.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Joseph Sweet:
But can it not do this with the same bytecode?
Or should it not be able to.

No. The native libraries are, by definition, not bytecode, but platform dependent machine code.

That's the biggest drawback of using SWT instead of Swing/AWT. Obviously the Eclipse team thinks that the advantages are worth it. (Swing and AWT are using native libraries, too. They are just already installed with the correct version of the JRE.)

[Joseph Sweet]

So the code of Eclipse is the same for all OS's, only the binaries (byte code) are different for each OS?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by Joseph Sweet:
So the code of Eclipse is the same for all OS's, only the binaries (byte code) are different for each OS?

Sigh.

No, the byte code is the same (generally, but more on this below.) But SWT, the window toolkit Eclipse uses, isn't written all in Java. There's Java code, but also platform-dependent native code mostly written in C/C++. An Eclipse installation contains the platform-independent Java bytecode, plus some platform-dependent libraries written in another language, which implement the parts of SWT that aren't written in Java.

(Now, why did I say that the bytecode is only "generally" the same on all platforms? Because there's some special-purpose code to handle platform differences. All this code is installed on all platforms, though, as far as I know.)