Is Eclipse platform independent?

Is eclipse platform independent?

As per my knowledge, eclipse is written in java. If it is so eclipse should be platform independe开发者_高级运维nt. But there are different eclipse for different OS???

No, you need to download a platform specific version because of SWT which accesses the native GUI libraries of the operating system using JNI. Note that Eclipse provides versions for most platforms (see for example All Platforms for the Eclipse SDK 3.5.1).

There are distributions of Eclipse for most Intel/AMD based platforms and for major UNIXs. You are also supposed to be able to compile and build it yourself on other platforms.

The differences stem primarily from three issues:

1) Availability of needed Java distribution on the platform (e.g., late introduction of newer Java versions on Mac).

2) 32bit vs. 64bit

3) Underlying UI toolkit While Eclipse can run under Swing, it may look like crap and perform pretty badly. People often expect more from the IDE, so the SWT can use some native widgets. Some plug-ins also need more direct access to the graphic subsystem. This, there are specific distributions of Eclipse that use specific platform graphic infrastructure. The most notable example is again Mac OS, where there was initially a version for Carbon, but only much later did a Cocoa version show up.

Most OS should support Eclipse. As long as it supports Java and SWT

If it is 100% java-based application, yes it will be platform independent. The problem is some code of Eclipse is not Java, so it's obvious that because of this code, Eclipse is not 100% platform independent. You can however just change that particular native jars with the suitable jars for your platform and Eclipse will then run correctly.