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by curyous 1665 days ago
It is supposed to be fast, but starts up in “seconds”. Shame.
3 comments

VS Code also starts in "seconds" on my machine, so if that's what they're targeting it's probably a success.
Vim/Neovim is practically instant, everything else it too slow in my book.
Considering the tools developers use in general (Visual Studio, VS Code, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Netbeans, various DB browsers, etc.), application start up time doesn't seem to be an important concern for the majority.
My IDE stays open (I keep all the common projects I work on open and just switch between them as needed). I rarely reboot. Startup time is completely irrelevant.
You typically leave an IDE open most of the time, and maybe start it up in the morning at most a few times a week.

For that, a cold launch time of a couple of seconds (VS Code) is fine, tens of seconds (Eclipse, XCode) is annoying.

Opening new files definitely needs to be instantaneous.

Yeah turns out the language server and other IDE features are resource intensive. Who knew. TextEdit also starts in under a second.
Why not starting them asynchronously? That's how Neovim does it. The editor starts instantly and the language server integration is enabled once the language server is active.
I use Vim with a language server and 10 other plugins that give me almost everything JetBrains offers. Only thing JetBrains is so much better at is fixing merge conflicts. Vim still starts instantly, and I never have to wait for it to index anything.

JetBrains is amazing, but I hate waiting for it. It stops me from starting work. Maybe that's just my problem.

On a given workday I always have at least one window of vscodr open that makes opening new files much faster than a cold start like vim et al are used
Once vs code and similar are up, the observed latency in opening additional files is what matters to most devs though.
Doesnt' really matter in my daily life if some IDE takes 0.1 or 10 seconds to start, since it's done so rarely. Might be more annoying with an editor if you're opening files often, then it starts to add up. Or if the editor is slow with editing and scrolling big files, like VSCode is.
exactly this.

I take 30 minutes to get into flow state, how long the IDE takes to start is irrelevant.

On my old laptop, it took like 15 minutes to start IntelliJ IDEA