In keep with its annual tradition of six years now, the Eclipse project released its major feature version, Galileo. Galileo is the culmination of the coordinated release of updates from 33 Eclipse subprojects, and contains over 24 million lines of code. According to the Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit group shepherding the Eclipse project, some 380 committers from 44 organizations participated in this release.

Eclipse Galileo carries three main themes: Furthering the adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise, improvements to the Eclipse modeling technology, and improvements to the Eclipse runtime itself. In addition, each sub-project included major feature enhancements as well. There are also a handful new features in Galileo as well.

Eclipse users on OS X will find the new support for Cocoa on 32 and 64 bit platforms welcome. A major new feature in Galileo is a memory heap analyzer jointly developed and contributed by IBM and SAP. The heap analyzer allows one to generate:

Productive heap dumps with hundreds of millions of objects, quickly calculate the retained sizes of objects, see who is preventing the Garbage Collector from collecting objects, run a report to automatically extract leak suspects.

The Eclipse runtime itself received an update by moving Equinox, its OSGi-based container, to the latest OSGi standard, and by improving its provisioning performance.

Another new Eclipse features is XText, a new framework to create Eclipse editors for domain-specific languages:

Just describe your very own DSL using Xtext's simple EBNF grammar language and the generator will create a parser, an AST-meta model (implemented in EMF) as well as a full-featured Eclipse text editor from that...

Together with optional configuration data you grammar will be transformed into a fully-blown editor similar to those of programing languages. It integrates seamlessly into the workbench and can be deployed as a stand-alone solution as well.

What do you think of the new Eclipse Galileo features?