Today I tried to set up the development environment for ELK on my new laptop. I started the installation via Oomph, but it did not work due to some inconsistency with Xtext versions. So I started cloning the repository myself, importing the projects into Eclipse and setting everything up, a very tedious process as you can imagine. This led me back to a thought that I've already had for some time:

Shall we fade out support for the Eclipse Platform?

I know it's a radical change with many ramifications. If we do it, of course there would be a period where we would still publish bugfix versions of the Eclipse plugins. But the ultimate goal would be to get to a core library that is built with plain Java + Gradle or Maven, with any IDE you like (Eclipse, IntelliJ, VS Code, etc.) Additional tools could still be built based on the core library.

To get an impression of what I'm talking about, please have a look at this proof of concept:
https://github.com/spoenemann/elk-core

To build it, simply clone it and run ./gradlew build. Use Buildship if you want to import it into Eclipse. A project setup like this would make it considerably easier for anyone to contribute to the project.

What do you think?