Kotlin and EclipseMode plugin

1

Hello,

I’ve installed the EclipseMode plugin into my IDEA and it works very well with Java. When I launch the application the time I have to look at the spinning wheel right to the Make symbol has become a lot shorter. Now I tried the same thing with Kotlin and it doesn’t seem to have an effect. This brought up the point of incremental compilation in Kotlin. I think some incremental compilation capabilities would be really beneficial. Currently the issue with build times in Scala is again hitting the fan, see this thread (“… are you using fast SSD?”). Does the EclipseMode plugin need to be extended to work with Kotlin or is my perception simply wrong that it does not have an effect? This post was put together quite quickly and it turned out a bit straight. Nevertheless, I like Kotlin and I think you are on the right track to take the good things from Scala and remove the things you can live without in order to get build times right ;-).

Regards, Oliver

2

Hi Oliver,

I’m not really familiar with how EclipseMode works, but I suspect it simply uses ecj, a faster compiler for Java, and some of the Eclipse infrastructure for incremental compilation. Since that has nothing to do with Kotlin, it shouldn’t have any effect on it.
IntelliJ IDEA has its own infrastructure for incrementality (which Kotlin integration does not support yet), but your experiment shows that whatever EclipseMode is doing, it’s faster.

We realize that incremental compilation is needed for Kotlin, but it’s a rather tricky business, and we have to postpone it a little to get other important work done. We have some ideas about how to come about it, and hopefully will have incremental compilation soon enough.