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Comment by astange | Hacker News Reader

Edit the idea64.vmoptions config file and use the GC of your choice. I've been running with ShenandoahGC for quite some time now and it's been working great.

Also, see https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime/releases/tag/j... for a JDK17 runtime for Intellij products. I've been running this too and it works great (but does require some tweaks to the vmoptions file).

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Text can look pretty bad if you're using other JVMs without their patches.

Yes particularly on Linux, any non jetbrains jdk running intellij looks awful. I don't know if the consider it as some kind of competitive advantage to not submit fixes upstream.

What are they doing in the JVM to make text look good?

I tried this last year but the version they shipped with IDEA didn't have ZGC and using an external JVM caused some weirdness in the GUI for me.

Curious before I try it, is the speed/performance any better?

It depends. There is less latency in the IDE due primarily to better GC (just as the article describes). I think the speed is better too on things like indexing the code base, but that could depend on your computer. I'm running on a 32core high end AMD system with lots of RAM, and I increase the heap setting in Intellij to 4G, etc. I think the IDE is subjectively better.

We run all our production applications on JDK17 too, which is why I push to run everything on 17.

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