[hugi]

If IntelliJ can't handle realtime rendering of text on modern hardware, perhaps the problem is with the software?

My kid spilled a glass of water on my 2018 MacBook last year (sob). At that time, word was out about the 2019 MacBooks with the new keyboards, so I decided to hold out, took out an old 2012 Mac Mini and have been doing my (Java/Swift) development on it for the past few months. It works so well, I've been in no hurry to pick up a new MacBook. Definitely don't feel animations or anything is laggy.

[gurkendoktor]

Indeed it is a software problem. In my experience, JetBrains IDEs perform terribly on macOS as soon as you use a 5K/scaled 4K screen.

A good GPU doesn't help. I've just upgraded to a new 16" MacBook Pro with the maxed-out GPU hoping it could handle CLion on a 4K screen, but it's still worse than anything that I've ever seen on Linux. (Not to mention that this laptop generally suffers from input lag.)

One of the many bug tracker threads about this issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526?p=JRE-526

There's a linked ticket about rewriting the renderer to use Metal on macOS, hopefully that will solve the issue once and for all.

[FpUser]

IntelliJ tools always felt like molasses to me. Maybe has something to do with them being done in Java. Most of my dev tools are native and the feeling is totally different.

[hugi]

Well, my two primary tools are Xcode and Eclipse. Xcode is native but Eclipse is much, much faster. I doubt appliction performance has much to do with the language they're written in.

[FpUser]

Not the language but what it compiles to and of course some sorcery that few people possess.

Anyways I had actually used Eclipse and did not find it particularly responsive. Been a while so maybe it is faster now.

[trumpeta]

yeah they have a bunch of open bugs about performance making it unusable, they are even rewriting their rendering to use Metal underneath

[nine_k]

Yes, the problem must be in software, but not that software.

IntelliJ is quite fast for me both on Windows and on Linux, no typing lag.

[hugi]

IntelliJ is unusable on my Mac Mini hardware.

[nine_k]

I'm afraid it's partly the problem of macOS and the Java implementation for it. That's what I meant speaking about "other" software.

[hugi]

But Eclipse and all other java software is amazingly fast. It's just IntelliJ that's really slow. I can't see how that can be blamed on "the java implementation"?

But is it a fact that the macOS Java implementation is bad? Do you have benchmarks or something else to support that?