Slashdot | MS .net vs Mono, Open Source: "Re:Eclipse and SWT on Monster
(Score:4, Insightful)
by 1000StonedMonkeys (593519) on Wednesday December 25, @08:19PM (#4958463)
Most users' experience with swing can be summed up with the following:

1. Open any swing application
2. Right click the mouse button somewhere a context menu should appear, or click on one of the file menus.
3. Wait 3 seconds
4. Form the incorrect conclusion that Java is slow
5. Go back to using native win32 programs

Sun's been trying to 'fix swing' for the last 5 years, and they've had no luck. What makes you think IBM has the magic bullet?

Swing will never be fast. The same abstractions that make it such a joy to program with make it terribly inefficiant. Print out a stack trace in a event handler function in swing and take a look at how deep it is. Every one of those functions had to be called before the event was process, and ever call had to be done through a table lookup. I'll avoid going into the whole native vs. non-native widgets debate, but forgive me if I remain skeptical about the non-native approach sun has been using with swing.

IBM (well, the company that wrote eclipse that IBM bought) did the right thing when they started from scratch to design SWT. Eclipse is amazingly responsive when compared to any swing application I've seen. Try it out yourself, I think you'll be impressed."