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Comment by gjvc | Hacker News Reader

The culprit is the JDK11-based JBR. I was ready to dump JetBrains tools due to their lagginess, but with some deviousness (which might not suit you), I now have them running slipperier than a wet fish, by using JDK15/16 and JAOTC.

Instructions are here: https://iam.georgecox.com/2021/11/24/making-jetbrains-ides-r...

(I am very keen to tell people who are in the same despair as I was about how slow JetBrains apps are out of the box -- hope it's not considered bad form to link to one's own blog post about it.)

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I've tried this now on my 2019 Macbook pro, and my 2018 Thinkpad T480 running Linux. On Mac, I can't say I really noticed a difference. Also there were quite a few font rendering issues that were resolved with whatever patches Jetbrains has applied. On Linux, certain actions are definitely faster. For instance, Ctrl+Tab to either quickly tab switch or bring up the tab switcher menu was always instantaneous, where-as beforehand there was sometimes a pretty long delay.

I will try this now; thanks for that!

please email me if you have any corrections / suggestions for improvement for the instructions :-)

Please note that the JBR is a custom build that contains a number of important changes and fixes, and it's not recommended to replace this. For M1 support, it's much better to use an M1 compatible JVM and .NET runtime. Rider 2021.2 is an Intel build, because when it was released there was no M1 compatible .NET Runtime.

Rider 2021.3 has an M1 build, and makes a big difference. It's currently in preview (https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/nextversion/) but will be released in the next week or so.

Liberica offers an M1 JVM https://bell-sw.com/announcements/2021/03/12/Liberica-on-App...

I wonder if JetBrains has some incentive to keep Mac users happy at the expense of others, because there is no justification for the unacceptably bad performance of CLion, PyCharm, and IDEA with a version 11 JDK on Linux, given how much better it is on JDK 15/16.

I have never seen any indication that they have are going to address this, nor have they even acknowledged that it's a problem, nor that they intend to upgrade from JDK 11 to something more up-to-date. Still, they have 1 year and 10 months from now until the end of active support, so perhaps this might provoke them into action.

The fact that JBR even exists is a red flag. Should every vendor ship their own JVM?!

This YouTrack item

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-3729

tells that JetBrains have been working on a JDK17 version of JBR for 2022.1, which amazingly, is almost upon us. I am looking forward to seeing what it's like!

I was under the impression that the JBR is missing a number of important changes and fixes that have already been mainlined into OpenJdk.

Would love to see some examples of this please :-)

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