For what it's worth, we (Jikes RVM)
have been getting complaints from users who are trying to browse Jikes
RVM source code using Eclipse that it is somewhat annoying to have tabs
in the source code. If a tab represents 8 spaces, but your spaces
per indentation level is something else (eg 2 or 4) then the IDE gets unhappy
and starts doing wierd stuff. It also creates a minor annoyance when
you get patches from users that created them in an ide where spaces per
tab is often set equal to indent level.
We've decided to give up on tabs in
all of Jikes RVM's source code as the slight increase in file size doesn't
seem to be worth the annoyance.
Just a random comment; the minor space
gains from using tabs may not be worth the trouble. YMMV.