Comment by jatone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jatone | Hacker News Reader

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no I want my IDE to be functional without destroying my system performance or fucking up my codebase. jet brains is a massive offender here. it doesn't need to be. I have a giant machine ~128GB of RAM and 24 cores. the fact I have to tune my IDE is insane.

the not helpful issues with jetbrains are when it crashes, slows down my system, prevents me from modifying files because reasons, modifies my build configurations in unsafe ways because it thinks it knows best, interferes with CLI run commands because it doesn't safely check that it can modify files owned by other applications.

I'll grant you these are generally issues with the individual plugins within jetbrains. why deal with all that when I don't have to? Why deal with the performance issues the JVM has when I don't have to?

vscode I get autocomplete, debuggers, decent linting, decent performance. that's an IDE in a nutshell. not a text editor.

I'm happy you enjoy JB, great. it doesn't change any of the above and havent seen any indicators that the above has changed or will change in the future for it. hence I don't use it.

fleet may be promising in this regard. but don't feel the need to jump ship when I already have remote code editing in vscode. which is the only real first class feature fleet has to distinguish itself from other IDEs.

That's just very different than my experience. Across a number of years and a few different major languages, from coding solo to working with teams. The only tuning I have to do is to tell it that using more RAM is ok. I'm sorry you're having those problems, and if you ever want to dig in on fixing them, drop me a line. But please understand it's pretty far off the median experience.

while I appreciate the offer; there is nothing to dig into here. jetbrains just doesn't bring anything to the table compared to other options. and it lost my trust on reliability in a massive way due to android studio and never really performing well at its core function, writing software, compared to things like sublime, vscode, even vim/emacs; once configured.

and if I'm going to pay for something like an IDE it needs to be rock solid when the free competition is competent.

It may not bring anything to the table for you. I would find it helpful if you phrased your criticisms in a way that didn't deny the possibility that others might find plenty of value.

perfectly happy how I've phrased my criticisms. if jetbrains wants glowing reviews, then they can make a glowing product. I've been upfront where my issues reside, how they impacted me and they are well known issues with the tool. I'm not the first to make these comments nor will I be the last.

however, your tone in this thread implies you're not a neutral player in this. do you have any relation with intellij/jetbrains?

I pay them money to use their IDE and have for some years. No other relationship.

I don't have any problem with you criticizing them. I have a problem with you stating your criticisms in ways that sound like it's more than just your experience.

For example, you wrote, "you need to muck around too much to get them working properly". This is not true. I don't need that. You apparently did need to do some mucking around that was too much for you.

Or you write, "JB makes tons of assumptions and attempts to be helpful in ways that just are not". Again, that might not be helpful for you. But it's very helpful to me. And clearly to lots and lots of other people given how popular their tooling is even though it costs actual money.

I think this sort of universalization and projection is unhelpful and ask that you not do it.

> jet brains is a massive offender here. it doesn't need to be. I have a giant machine ~128GB of RAM and 24 cores. the fact I have to tune my IDE is insane.

You are doing something very wrong if that's the case. I have 2 big projects open in my IDE (GoLand), it has not been closed since Nov 16 and as I type this it is using ~3.8 GB of RAM and ~3% CPU on my work 2019 Mac Book

My personal travel laptop is ~2014 era thinkpad T430, an outdated machine and it has never once hiccuped while running the IDE.

This is almost certainly a "you not JetBrains" problem.

it was android studio stuff at the time. I just tapped out of using it jetbrains related tooling after that experience.

the point I was making is that it wasn't an under powered machine that causing issues as implied by the responder.

sadly the issues I was having at the time were not just me all of them were documented / reported in the github issue tracker for flutter/android studio.

I think the basic intellij config is set at max 2 gigs of RAM, so it doesn’t really matter how many you have unless you change that.

I really don’t know how did you manage to crash it, even with misbehaving plugins it will manage the situation gracefully (usually with a notification that this plugin had an exception) but will continue to run perfectly. Modifying files due to locking sounds like a Windows issue, and has nothing to do with intellij.

I really don’t know what have you configured for all these things to happen — what language was that project written in?

> I think the basic intellij config is set at max 2 gigs of RAM

yes, that is the conservative JDK defaults iirc; its likely unrelated to intellij specifically. I only mentioned the system specs because the other commenter was like 'i buy nice machines and give the editor tons of RAM'. but thats the cost of them using java. I don't want to tune my editor to ensure its responsive and can get its job done.

> Windows issue, and has nothing to do with intellij

except I exclusively run linux. ;)

> what language was that project written in?

early days for a flutter app. most of the issues most certainly due to the plugins themselves.

it was primarily gradle tasks running without prompting and fucking up my build.

I didn't configure anything. the experience was so bad I just bailed out, switched to my standard stack vscode and the command line stuff and never looked back.

> yes, that is the conservative JDK defaults iirc; its likely unrelated to intellij specifically

No, it is explicitly set by intellij through its vmoptions file. The JDK by default uses as much as half of all available RAM (that is for maximum usage. It doesn’t start there)

Wait, all of this complaint is for a niche language in "early days" and you didn't even bother to try giving it more RAM? For a guy who just had to suggest I was a shill, that's a lot of information you left out of your initial judgement.

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