I want to share some benchmarks for building an Eclipse project with Maven/Tycho. I built the project on Linux, Windows, and macOS (in particular, on my Mac Air M1 2020).

I stressed that the macOS environment is an M1, the new Arm-based chip from Apple, which is said to be quite efficient and performant. However, I also used an older Mac Air 2016, so no M1 here.

Concerning Linux and Windows, I used an LG GRAM 16. Both are good machines with powerful processors, 16Gig RAM, and NVMe disk. I ran the same build on a few Linux distributions (Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora) and the results concerning Linux are basically the same.

The Eclipse project is Edelta, https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/edelta, “An Xtext DSL for EMF metamodels refactoring and migration.” It’s quite a complex project with an extensive test suite: unit tests, integration tests (JUnit Plug-in tests), and SWTBot tests. The project also includes a custom Maven plugin, which is also tested. Yes, I’m test-addicted 😉

To avoid the Internet connection influencing the benchmarks, I first run the Maven build once so that Maven downloads and caches all the dependencies. Moreover, I first mirrored the p2 Eclipse artifacts so that the target platform definition is resolved against the local mirror.

LG GRAM 16 (LINUX) Total time: 03:25 min

LG GRAM 16 (WINDOWS) Total time: 04:20 min

MACBOOK AIR M1 Total time: 02:49 min

MACBOOK AIR 2016 Total time: 08:17 min

I must say I was impressed by the best performance shown by the M1 processor!

As expected, on the same machine, Windows performs worse than Linux 🙂

The performance of the old Mac Air is not impressive, but that’s an old machine.

Just for fun, I ran the same build on the PineBook Pro (which runs Manjaro KDE): Total time: 21:27 min. Of course, that’s not usable for intensive development 😉