Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tiew9Vii 8 days ago
I've used InteliJ on and off for 20 plus years. It's progressively got bloated and slower, not faster.

20 years ago it was the fast lean option when there was Netbeans and Eclipse. Today it's ok, still good feature wise but fast and lean it is not anymore when I've used it for Scala oand Kotlin.
2 comments
sajithdilshan 8 days ago
I remember it was pretty slow even like early 2020s. But since they have introduced the new UI design IDE, somehow they have optimized it.

I think they made it modular so only the core module that is needed are loaded and some modules are loaded only if it's needed by a plugin. Also, they have optimized indexing as well. I remember the whole thing slowed down when it starts to index a medium size gradle project, but now it runs the indexing in the background but the rest of the IDE quite responsive.

However, it seems like in general they are moving at right direction when it comes to optimizing the core of the IDE and all other functionalities comes as plugins and you can just uninstall them if not needed. I use the community edition every day and recently I have been using claude code for coding, but I still use debug console most of the time. I haven't found another IDE which is as powerful as IDEA when it comes to debugging a JVM language project.

link
gib444 8 days ago
Yup. It's been particularly bad since around 2023/2024 and only got worse with all the AI crap, though I think that's been almost a useful scapegoat for them recently
link
wiether 8 days ago
I've tried (all?) the AI stuff they published, it was awful; but I was able to easily uninstall/deactivate those features once I realized it was not helpful.

On my MBP M4 or my Linux laptop, I never get the impression that it's bloat.

Prior to using IntelliJ I had been a Eclipse user and I've never experienced even 5% of the pain I had with Eclipse since moving to IntelliJ.

When everything is going to shite, I welcome with pleasure my yearly invoice from JetBrains, thinking that, at least, there is a company pushing quality software that deserves my money.

link
flossly 8 days ago
Emacs is great for LISP-like langs.

IJ is great for JVM langs.

Sure one can cross-use the above, but that's harder.

Still great to have an IDE agnostic Kotlin LSP!

link