[metroholografix]

Something is definitely wrong with your configuration (in a wide sense, not necessarily restricted to just the editor).

Emacs is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than IDEA (or any other JetBrains IDE). Start with a stock Emacs, no extra third party packages loaded, to get a sense of performance. There is a lot of great Emacs Lisp code out there, but the opposite is also true: Horrible code written by folks new to Emacs and Emacs Lisp, that can slow down Emacs a lot and contribute to a degraded experience. Which is why I recommend starting from scratch and incrementally adding third party code/configuration (ideally, understanding the code as you go along and avoiding packages with lots of dependencies).

[gpderetta]

Personally, I find that normally emacs latency is more than tolerable. But LSP is pretty bad, at least with clang-lsp, especially on a fairly loaded machine. I have yet to try the jit branch though.