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Comment by b_e_n_t_o_n | Hacker News Reader

My only problem with jetbrains UI is that it's slow. Night and day difference using even vscode, let alone vim, sublime, helix, zed, etc. I tolerate it because the functionality it brings, but I find myself actually writing code in something faster. And I don't see fleet improving on this in a meaningful way - it's basically a competitor to vscode, which I don't use for the same reasons I won't use fleet.

There is a whole nother discussion about "progressive discovery" of functionality which I think is actually wrong although that would be a fringe view among "UX" specialists.

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Jetbrains always leave so much performance on the table!!

Jetbrains IDEs go pretty fast when the JVM running them is switched over to the ZGC garbage collector, and by making sure the Metal or Vulkan renderer are being used. (And DirectX on Windows? idk?)

The difference is pretty stark. ZGC is Verygood. Everything is very responsive. This is not an “enterprisey” JVM GC that takes ages to spin up for throughput. It’s quick.

The whole IDE starts up in like 1 second on my 2018 Intel i7 laptop?, including open projects and all. It’s wild how fast IntelliJ can get – and it’s also kinda wild how much performance they leave on the table with the default options.

It’s an easy config change in the .vmoptions file.

I think on macOS the Metal GPU-accelerated UI rendering is the default these days. On Linux you need to opt in to the Vulkan equivalent. It’s still a bit unrefined but worth it even now.

ZGC is a much bigger difference though. Try it!!!

If it's a simple drop in improvement, I wonder why it's not enabled by default?

Seems like some things become faster while other things become slower? https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-1284/Increase-defa...

I’ve wondered about the same thing.

–Thanks for the link!

I only notice things getting much quicker, fwiw. I do habitually throw resources at the IDE as mentioned in the next Youtrack comment down.

Oooh thanks! I'll try this out.

Slow? Jetbrains IDEs, slow? Compared to, of all things, the LSP-reliant VS Code?

I pay for them primarily to save me from LSP, which they do for many languages, though the Elixir plugin is not by Jetbrains (but it actually predates LSP itself).

Exactly this. Every time I revisit a Jetbrains product, I uninstall it within 5 minutes. It doesn't matter how great the features are, it's just sluggish.

People can rag on Electron apps all they like, but VSCode on modern hardware is very snappy. Jetbrains is a noticeable downgrade.

Weird. None of my PCs have cpus made after 2018. After the initial indexing, things are fast. I guess that's what you're running into on startup.

There are still things like opening a menu somewhere that has a random worst case latency of ~2 seconds for me. It feels random and is frustrating, but not quite enough where I'd consider learning to use something else

interesting, what menu? Just curious if I have gotten used to it. My desktop is a 2700x and my laptop is an 8th gen i7, hardly competitive nowadays. I usually have 3-6 IDE windows open. I think sometimes resolving TS types in Webstorm can take a few seconds after some changes.

It's not Sublime Text fast, for sure.

Just use Eclipse or Netbeans instead, I never liked InteliJ for Java development due to its continuous indexing, errors have to be explicilty asked for, and the ten finger combos for shortcuts.

VSCode is anyway running either Netbeans or Eclipse headless for its Java support, better use the real deal.

Yep, same here. I just uninstall because it's unusable compared to vscode/vim/emacs/zed for the same jobs. And I have a new-ish macbook pro. I always hear people say they have a different experience, but, like with so many things in life, that always seems not true when I sit next to them; then it is just them being used to sluggish misery as the normal.

No complaints on my MacBook Air M2. What machine are you on?

It’s definitely not as fast to load etc as say sublime, but it’s an IDE not an editor.

Well.. I'm running it on an M3 and it can be truly slow. Not always! But opening up a package inside a multi-module Kotlin project can literally take 10 seconds. Which isn't much seeing how great of an IDE it is and how much time it saves because it is so powerful. But it's heavy alright. Every time I see new features I don't really use, I wish they would invest in trimming fat instead.

There's something really not right there. Right click the bottom right status bar area, enable memory monitor and ensure you aren't running out of RAM or something. I use IntelliJ on an old Intel MacBook with a large Kotlin project and its performance is good. I never have to wait ten seconds for something like that. It sounds like you may have some old flag that's limiting its heap size or pushing it into GC thrashing or something. Definitely look at the IDE logs and see if you can track it down.

I actually use Jetbrains products because of the performance.

Sure indexing a new project takes a while and things will be sluggish at first but once it done, it works great. And you can easily edit huge files, like seriously huge files without problems, even the search will work smoothly. Basically the Java school of performance, absolute resources hog but scales very well.

For me vscode is intolerably slow. Sure it starts up quickly but the editing experience is absolutely infuriating. I had projects that I could not work with in vscode because a few thousand lines of code in a file were already too much for it.

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