Why is Eclipse 4 better than Eclipse 3

So there are many people around asking themselves why the hell did they rewrite the whole foundation of the Eclipse SDK while I as a user of the SDK don't gain any benefits on first sight. I'm try to collect some of the reasons why I think Eclipse 4 is superior to Eclipse 3 (and Eclipse 3 RCP) in the next few weeks and cover them in a blog post like this one.

Easier to add features / fix bugs

I've just released a feature to Eclipse 4 which took me no more than 5 minutes to implement (Bug 355763). I've also worked on the same feature in 3.x and there it took me around 2 days to understand how this whole thing works and another few days coming up with a fix which finally could not be applied because it didn't worked in some corner cases (Bug 355750). Advantage 1: Committers can fix bugs much faster

Not every feature is hardcoded in the workbench plugin

Many features like e.g. the collapsing of empty containers is not hard coded into the workbench code itself but implemented with so called addons who listen to the workbench application model and react upon changes in there (e.g. the removal of children in a container, ...) but because the thing is an addon and you miss the durable feature (like many people did in 3.x for a long time) and don't find a committer to implement it for you can now do it your own by replacing only a small discrete piece of code. Advantage 2: Developers can add features / fix problems themselves without waiting for up-stream committers to implement it for them Advantage 3: We the platform committers don't own all the worlds problems because we have to implement it in our code and have to deal with the maintenance