It was, for C++, for a couple of years, 12-13 years ago. It's neither laggy nor slow for the last 8-9 years. I've written my Ph.D. thesis on it, on C++, which was a sizeable high performance code.
It never crashed, allowed me to work remotely if required, integrated with Valgrind, allowed me to do all my tests, target many configurations at once, without shutting it down even once.
Currently it has a great indexer (which is actually an indexer + LSP + static analyzer and more), LSP support if you wish, and tons of features.
It gets a stable release every three months, comes with its own optimized JRE if you don't want to install one on your system, etc.
Plus, it has configuration snapshots, reproducible configurability, configuration sync and one click config import for migrating/transforming other installs.
While Eclipse today is certainly a quite decent IDE, I use it mostly in the form of STM32CubeIDE[1] now, it was servicable at most back in 2005-2006 when I used it for some Java classes.
In any case, it's a younger product than the offerings in the article.
Not just C++. I used to use it for Java development and had the same experiences as the GP too.
I’m sure it’s really good these days. But I’ve moved on now and my current workflow works for me, so I don’t see the point in changing it until I run into issues again.
Java never got that slow, but it used to tax the system a lot in the earlier days, yes.
I developed Java with Eclipse, but the project I did was not that big when Eclipse was not its prime, and it was in its prime when I was experienced enough to be able to "floor it" in terms of features and project complexity.
Now it's just a blip on the memory usage graph when working with big projects, and way way more efficient than the Electron apps which supposed to do 20% of what Eclipse can do.
