I am a long time user of the open sourced eclipse Java IDE, starting with Callisto released in June of 2006. Since then the Eclipse Foundation has faithfully released a new version named, in alphabetical order, after random astronomical objects and other lunatics.

To my surprise, eclipse was available for the Raspberry Pi, starting with the “Jessie” release of Raspbian OS. Unfortunately this was the eclipse Juno 3.8 build, which still used the EOL’d Java 7 JDK.

After the Juno release, the Eclipse Foundation no longer cross-compiled the IDE for the Raspberry Pi’s ARM architecture. If you wanted to run a later version of eclipse on Raspbian, you had to build it yourself, which is no small feat.

The Eclipse Foundation has recently announced that, because of the popularity of the Raspberry Pi platform and its greatly improved performance with the latest version, eclipse would again be cross compiled for the AArch64 architecture. This is now available from the eclipse.org website for download (yay!)

I’m happy to report that the latest version of eclipse 4.2.1 works extremely well on the new Raspberry Pi running the 64bit “bullseye” release of Raspbian. To test this out on your own Pi, simply download the OS image and write it onto an SD card using the Raspberry Pi imager, download the latest version of eclipse, and Bob’s your uncle! Oh, don’t forget to install the default-jdk (Java 11) first before trying to start up eclipse.

I hope this helps – please leave a comment if you have questions or run into problems.