On Ubuntu 16.04, I’m encountering a problem in the Eclipse distributions with Spoofax pre-installed.

When I start-up Eclipse, I get to the Workbench, but a Java process is taking up about 90% of one of my CPUs indefinitely, and Eclipse is fairly unresponsive. Note that this problem arises before importing any projects into Eclipse.

I have tried this with the Spoofax-1.5 stable release, the Spoofax-2.0 beta release, and the latest Spoofax-2.0 build, and suffer the same problem in each case. However, if I use a standard Eclipse (Mars) distribution, and then install Spoofax (1.5 stable) from within Eclipse, I do not encounter this problem. Previously I was using Ubuntu 14.04, where the Eclipse distribution with Spoofax (1.5 stable) pre-installed did not suffer this problem.

Submitted by Neil Sculthorpe on 22 June 2016 at 11:58

When I google for “Eclipse Ubuntu 16.04” I get lots of hits about Eclipse is not working well on Ubuntu 16.04 because of GTK+ 3, did you look into that?

Aha, I think that is the problem. The solution they recommend (which worked for me) is to add the following to the eclipse.ini file:

–launcher.GTK_version
2

Great! I added the workaround to the getting started documentation.