Ask HN: High performance, low latency IDE suggestions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: High performance, low latency IDE suggestions

5 pointsboronine11 comments

I'm an IntelliJ user on M2 Mac, I've been testing VS Code out of curiosity and found it a bit slow, even simple things like "go to definition" have annoying latency.

Out of pure curiosity, is there any alternative to JetBrains in this regard? I am aware of LSP, but skeptical that it can ever be fast due to its client-server design.

Any programming language is fine as long as it has static types.

View on HN

My current primary workstation is very low spec and old compared to a M2 Mac. On that machine Sublime Text is very performant and provides an awesome code writing experience through LSP. I use it as a daily driver with TypeScript, Go and Dart. I try out IntelliJ (or Android Studio) and VSCode occasionally to check out how they are these days but they feel sluggish in comparison.

If you need more IDE-like features like running tests and builds or managing for example mobile phone emulators from the editor it requires more fiddling with configuration and plugins but is doable.

Zed just went OSS, and it is really fast. Check it out: https://zed.dev/

Very interesting, I'm going to test this. Seems that Rust is the best supported language?

No Java support yet, and it's a long way away from being a viable alternative to IntelliJ. Fast though, if you're on a Mac.

I actually found it kinda slow in terms of showing hints (squiggled highlights) and it doesn't seem to follow symbols across a project the way VScode and IntelliJ do. Guess it's more of an editor than an IDE in that regard.

Do you find IntelliJ slow? Once mine finishes indexing a project, the rest of the time it feels lighting fast. M2 Max here, 32GB. I think I allocated 16GB to IntelliJ (manually, in the help menu I think). I usually have Webstorm and RubyMine running side by side (for frontend and backend projects) along with a bunch of other apps and browser windows and they all feel really snappy. Hmm. Are your projects huge? Or does Java have a lot more overhead?

Jetbrains also offers hosted instances if you want to see if that's any faster... https://www.jetbrains.com/space/features/dev-environments.ht...

(I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that network latency at 30-100ms shouldn't be as noticeable as a slow computer, if that's really the issue)

To be clear, I find IntelliJ extremely fast, surprisingly so in fact. I was only looking for alternatives out of curiosity.

I have not found a better 'true' IDE experience than JetBrains. Once it has done it's thing, it works pretty good. If your projects are big like a C++ codebase +2mil LOC then well the latency is going to suffer.

If you count VSCode as an IDE then I would suggest neovim with an LSP and a fuzzy finder. It is the fastest/best dev setup I have experienced for most things.

If you are very latency sensitive I am afraid an IDE/'smart'-editor may not be for you. Then I again would consider some lightweight editor that has fuzzy search and no intellisense.

I don't think the client/server design of LSP is a limiting factor itself. That said, nothing seems to beat JetBrains these days so I am also on that wagon.

For Java, the fastest editor/IDE used to be JCreator. At that time, the only Java IDE made with native/C++ tech. Sadly, it is abandoned.

I am satisfied with my various language specific neovim configs. There’s some upfront cost, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com