Re: Scanning project classpaths should not be modal

Hi Gili,
please note that scanning of classpaths takes a long time only for the 
first time when all the metadata are created. Consequent scans of rt.jar 
take less than a second.
We are also continously working on speeding this up - this week we have 
integrated a change that improved the performance of the scanning by 
20-50% depending on the directory layout and whether you use VCS or not. 
Moreover we are considering elimination of the initial scanning of the 
platform jars (src.zip, rt.jar) by distributing the pre-scanned indexes 
with the IDE or moving the scanning work to the installer, so even the 
initial delay when using the IDE for the first time should be eliminated.
When we considered modal vs. non-modal scanning before we started to 
work on the implementation, these were some of the reasons why we 
decided to make the scanning modal:
- the IDE does not pretend that you can work with it when it quite 
heavily utilizes the CPU and some actions (like code completion) would 
not work correctly - having the dialog modal you know that you have to 
wait, IDE does it job as quickly as it can, there is a clear indication 
of when the action is finished and you know that once it is finished, 
everything should work well.
- having the dialong non-modal would make the implementation much more 
complicated - currently all the features manipulating with the java 
source code rely on the indexes that are created during the scanning, so 
these indexes are necessary even when you want to open a single file - 
the parser uses them to resolve identifiers in the source code to 
display override annotations correctly, to make code completion work, 
etc. Being unable to rely on the fact that the codebases are scanned 
before you start to work with the java files would result in a 
duplication of some logic and make the architecture more complicated.
If this turns out to be a bigger usability problem than we originally 
thought, we may revisit this in some of the future releases.
Regards,
Martin

Gili wrote:

>	Scanning rt.jar and other big files takes a while and it is annoying to have to wait 3-5 mins while this 
>processing takes place when I could very well continue with my work in the background.
>
>	I look forward to your feedback.
>
>Gili
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