I've been archiving and testing old versions of the Eclipse SDK development environment this past week. I discovered that Eclipse 3.5.2 is the very last version that will run on Windows 98. Unfortunately, it's too old to support null analysis. And as much as I love Java, I really love my null annotations. So, I spent the last few days backporting it from 4.2.1.

Null annotations, static analysis, grammar lines, and error logging all seem to work.

I've released the source code changes to GitHub. This is a very quick-and-dirty merge with minor tweaks to get the code to work. I have not tested it extensively, as I was only curious to see if it could be done on the off chance that I might decide to use it sometime in the future.

This project stems from a hobby of writing code on old systems, but with as much modern convenience as possible to write "good" code. It is very difficult to avoid working with null reference in Java due to their presence in the JDK and third-party libraries. Their presence in Java has been called The Billion Dollar Mistake. Null annotation allows writing safer code by leveraging static analysis of where objects may be null in your code before it's compiled. This is extremely convenient and encourages defensive programming habits.

This is a backport of Eclipse JDT Core Batch Compiler (ECJ) 3.7.2 and supporting org.eclipse.jdt.core and org.eclipse.jdt.ui plugin code from Eclipse 4.2.1. This is a proof of concept that targeted the earliest release of ECJ to support null analysis and the first release of Eclipse to coincide with this version of ECJ to maximize code compatibility. The earliest releases were chosen to make backporting to such an old version of Eclipse easier. Support for newer versions of ECJ and Eclipse UI compiler options properties dialog should be possible.

The purpose of this backport is to add support for JDT null analysis to the last release of Eclipse which could run on Windows 98. Now you can enjoy programming on your vintage computer with your vintage IDE, targeting a vintage JVM with the luxury of full null analysis for writing robust and bug-free code.

https://github.com/eclipse-backports/3.5.2-jd … -null-analysis/