## What's New in Eclipse 4.12 (Platform)

Here are descriptions of some of the more interesting or significant changes made to the Eclipse Platform for the 4.12 release of Eclipse. They are grouped into:

- Views, Dialogs and Toolbar
- Themes and Styling
- Equinox

Plug-in developers will also be interested in the corresponding What's new document in the plug-in developer's guide.

We also recommend to read the Tips and Tricks.

## Views, Dialogs and Wizards

Import project by passing it as command-line argument | You can import a project into Eclipse by passing its path as a parameter to the launcher. The command would look like `eclipse /path/to/project` on Linux and Windows, or `open Eclipse.app -a /path/to/project` on macOS.

Launch Run and Debug configurations from Quick Access

From the Quick Access proposals (accessible with `Ctrl+3` shortcut) you can now directly launch any of the Run or Debug configurations available in your workspace.

Note: For performance reasons, the extra Quick Access entries are only visible if the `org.eclipse.debug.ui` bundle was already activated by some previous action in the workbench such as editing a launch configuration, or expanding the Run As... menus.

## Themes and Styling

Improved View Menu Icon | The icon used for the view menu has been improved. It is now crisp on high resolution displays and also looks much better in the dark theme. Compare the old version at the top and the new version at the bottom:
High resolution images drawn on Mac | On Mac, images and text are now drawn in high resolution during GC operations. You can see crisp images on high resolution displays in the editor rulers, forms, etc in Eclipse. Compare the old version at the top and the new version at the bottom:
Table/Tree background lines shown in dark theme on Mac | In dark theme on Mac, the `Table` and `Trees` in Eclipse now show the alternating dark lines in the background when `setLinesVisible(true)` is set. Earlier they had a gray background even if line visibility was true. Example of a Tree and Table in Eclipse with alternating dark lines in the background:

## Equinox

Support activating bundles in parallel

When the Equinox OSGi Framework is launched the installed bundles are activated according to their configured start-level. The bundles with lower start-levels are activated first. Bundles within the same start-level are activated sequentially from a single thread.

A new configuration option `equinox.start.level.thread.count` has been added that enables the framework to start bundles within the same start-level in parallel. The default value is `1` which keeps the previous behavior of activating bundles from a single thread. Setting the value to `0` enables parallel activation using a thread count equal to `Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors()`. Setting the value to a number greater than `1` will use the specified number as the thread count for parallel bundle activation.

The default is `1` because of the risk of possible deadlock when activating bundles in parallel. Extensive testing must be done on the set of bundle installed in the framework before considering enabling this option in a product.