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Comment by rootlocus | Hacker News Reader

> And if you do, jesus, there's better alternatives than JavaFX (use Qt).

Because "god forbid" anyone use technologies associated with java? FUD at its finest.

> Fat chance Visual Studio Code (often hailed as "one of the best-optimized electron apps") would have existed on Linux without Electron.

I just use IntelliJ IDEA. It's ten times faster and ten times more powerful than Visual Studio Code. And it's written with java swing.

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As someone who spends all day in IntelliJ there's no way it's 10x as fast, hell for me it's flipped the other direction.

VSCode is easily 10x faster than IntelliJ. If I'm writing Java I'll happily use IntelliJ but anything else it's VSCode or vim.

Sure vim beats out both of them but I'm constantly having to wait for VSCode to catch up with me or my cursor will start inserting characters at the wrong spot. IntelliJ works as fast as I can think (minus the boot up time).

Are you running stock or loaded with plugins ?

Stock Android IntelliJ, VSCode with a few plugins(Vim bindings mostly).

Android "yes, you gave me 2 GB RAM for Gradle for building a 10 MB APK, but I'd still like more" Studio.

Same here, in a legacy code base with millions of lines of duplicated code that I unfortunately had to work on, IntelliJ would not even let me type, it just froze up all the time. Atom also sucked, fuzzy finder locked up the UI for 10 minutes. VSCode I can cold boot & start using the fuzzy finder, no issues. Feels like vim, in that it "just works". So performance is more dependent on what the software is doing, not what UI toolkit / runtime it uses. VSCode is faster on this codebase because it seems to not block editing due to a search index, like the others -- which has nothing to do with Electron vs Java.

I use Eclipse with its native SWT UI and VSCode still blows it away in UI speed.

Actually, if Mozilla's Servo tech gets integrated into something like Electron, then we will have some serious performance capabilities surpassing pretty much anything else comparable.

I believe the VSCode team is indeed looking into using webassembly.

IntelliJ faster than VS Code? I don’t think anyone who’s used both products could make such a claim with a straight face.

I joke with my coworkers that I know they’ve fired up IDEA because I can hear it. Whenever it’s on, their fans are dialed up to full blast.

I'm curious how large the project is and whether it's the same project on both editors.

I'm gonna make such a claim with a straight face. I don't know if it's VSCode's vim emulation or what, but on every platform I've tried it on IntelliJ beats it, while VSCode is busy catching up to where my cursor is still after chaining like 2 vim commands.

VSCode's vim plugin is pretty awful performance wise (I should know, I use it every day).

IntelliJ is slow to start up (though I've no idea why that would matter for an IDE). And when indexing and building it can be very demanding on machine resources.

But I've never found it slow in any respect that matters for doing actual work. For everything that matters (opening files, project-wide search/replace, refactoring, typing latency, looking up docs, code navigation etc) it's easily competitive with lightweight editors.

I mean, Java applications work ludicrously well. They're not slow, and they really do run on anything. I'm straight up double-clicking .jar files on Mac and Windows without any problems (on linux double click is kinda a myth so I just "java -jar" it). There are good Look&Feel jars for swing. I just wish Swing itself didn't feel like enterprise programming. Java requires me to be so verbose it feels like I'm doing WebDev again.

I'm convinced all of the mud slung on Java is due to enterprise programs and other software not motivated by quality (more of a "you have no choice but to use this to interact with our hardware/service and we CBA to make multi platform so you're stuck with our lazy java. Oh, and we come from the school of abstracting things to hell because creating more red tape impresses upper management.")

IntelliJ is I think the first application that showed me that Java is Good, Actually™ by delivering on those mythical promises of compatibility and speed.

They don't seem to like double-click on the Linux Desktop. AppImage? Yeah, just go to the console, make it executable, then run it from there.

I think freedesktop made some standard for this, but I'm afraid it's making .desktop files that are just .INIs with the console commands to run. XDG is a weird place.

This is surprising, I've never seen anyone say that IDEA is faster than VSC. In my experience it's _vastly_ slower.

There's something wrong in that case.

I work with a project that contains tens of thousands of classes that span about 3m lines of code. Jump to any symbol responds to a fuzzy search in about one second. Jump to class autocompletes instantly as I type, and a rename takes a few seconds to update all classes in the project, including references from xml files and comments.

In IDEA, right?

Yes.

+1 for intelliJ, or anything jetbrains. vscode gets a lot of hype but for serious development its still a toy. that said, as far as vscode proving that electron apps can be done very well, i do agree

why do "serious" Developers have to use heavyweight IDEs? what makes a more basic editor a toy?

I'd say a lack of powerful navigation and refactoring tools.

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