If you ever encounter the dreaded “The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.” error message when starting the Eclipse executable launcher and you are running Windows make sure that the path to the folder containing the Eclipse executable launcher ist not too big.

As of 2016 most Windows programs and APIs still can not cope with paths longer than 256 characters:

Eclipse Executable Launcher Error message.

Especially when running Maven Tycho builds the path containing the Eclipse executable launcher tend to get long. For instance:

/cygdrive/c/Users/zaunerc/eclipse_workspaces/a_project/repos/e4-notification/org.beanaire.ui.e4.notification.demo.product/target/products/org.beanaire.ui.e4.notification.demo.product/win32/win32/x86_64/e4-notification-demo.exe`

If you have to troubleshoot other problems dealing with the Eclipse executable launcher or you just want to see how it’s implememented you can checkout the source code here.

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