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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

> Forget what VSCode is doing.

Except for remote development extension. Do that. It's the killer feature of VSCode.

They do that, I’m playing with it now. Have a look at Jetbrains Gateway: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

I'll admit I haven't looked recently, but last time I looked, it felt like Jetbrains didn't quite get my use cases for remote development. I don't want to install/manage any infrastructure at all. I just want to connect via ssh to a fresh box and have it work. If that isn't possible, back to the drawing board.

Does it work with Rider yet? At launch it didn't, something to do with Rider using (or not, I forget!) an out of process language server.

It’s supposed to work (like, it’s an option in Rider’s project selection), but it can’t find MSBuild in the WSL. I’m guessing you’d have better luck if you just spun up a normal Linux VM though.

How is it working for you? I tried the beta version last year and I was not impressed. Is it worth trying again?

I found the performance very poor and had to discontinue using it. It permanently pinned 4 cores on the remote server where VS Code used <0.25 (codebase was a very small Django app)

I tried out fleet last night and it worked amazingly well.

Why would one do remote development with laptops being as powerful as they are today (think: the raw power of an M1 Mac Book Air even).

Because my ec2 dev server is even more powerful, and I can easily upgrade the hardware configuration without spending $1k on a new laptop.

I never really appreciated a remote dev server until I had to work on a behemoth Java project and then a behemoth C++ project. Having the extra memory and the extra cores is great. Never having to worry about your laptop heating up or having your battery die due to CPU load is even better.

I guess if your IDE is as responsive as anything else locally and only the compiling and runtime happens in the cloud it might be somewhat pleasant to work with. But what if you decide to do something from a coffee shop and the WiFi is super laggy. Or doing something while traveling etc. I like to know that my dev station is independent of an Internet connection.

With crappy Internet connection you still can do remote development (it doesn't take much bandwidth, after all it's mostly text). But what if you need to download dependencies/docker images or upload e.g. docker image? With a remote development you can offload that to a beefy server with gigabit connection.

That is indeed a good point.

"Remote development" does not necessarily imply that development happens on a remote machine. I use remote development extensions to work directly on projects inside WSL2.

Same here. 'Remote' development for me isn't about how far away it is, it is about developing across (virtual/container/cloud) 'machine' boundaries.

Company policy, network topology/firewalls, having to run things in a terminal on another machine (which is already there with remote development).

7950x

Last time I tried remote development with PyCharm was when they released their "Remote development" beta in version 2021.3 [1]. It was a bad experience. Before that they only had some complicated sync workaround for remote development which I could not get used to.

I gave up on remote development with PyCharm and went with VSCode.

Based on your comment it seems they still haven't figured it out?

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/whatsnew/2021-3/#remote-de...

This is literally the only reason I use VS Code right now.

JetBrains has Code With Me, in case you hadn't seen that. I have no idea how they compare, though, so I don't mean this as a dismissal.

  > Except for remote development extension.

And the roads.

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