[roperj]

I’m saying the complexity of IDEs such as IntelliJ is concentrated in their base infrastructure of indexing and refactoring engine and that hasn’t changed all that much in the past decade. That there are more and more new language plugins and some nice UX features built on this core do not reflect some major new complexity in the past decade.

New language plugins and some incremental features that usually only cost when you use them have been added continuously for years.

IntelliJ was already capable in 2010. Your initial example was about fast global search - a feature available for more than 10 years.

[manmal]

If you are vaguely familiar with big software cores like the Linux kernel, you‘ll realize that extensions are often not „clean“ and need changes in the core, too. Yes, the Linux kernel is still super performant and runs on very old hardware, but you wouldn’t be able to run all those new features on old hardware that the kernel has accommodated since.

[roperj]

Entertaining, because I still run IntelliJ and CLion on a decade old Lenovo T430 running Linux with nothing more than a RAM upgrade and overall it works more smoothly now than it did 10 years ago.

This is due as much due to massive. improvements in the JRE itself over that time period in addition to IntelliJ itself.

I’m vaguely familiar with the Linux kernel enough to write drivers and contribute the odd mm or vfs patch over the years. But more pertinent - I develop an IntelliJ plugin.

I was asking for something specific and the response just gets more vague.