Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

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Jetbrains IDEs aren't free (and cost many times more than what is fair for the quality of the product they are known to ship), and SharpLab only has a partial implementation of it: https://github.com/ashmind/SharpLab/issues/616

> The Roslyn sdk is part of .NET (cross platform) these days so anyone can use it to build a visualiser should they wish to.

Of course, but for most people that need this, they may just be trying to figure out how to do something as simple as adding an analyzer rule to a project, and don't have the luxury to be able to delay that work to spend weeks cobbling together a visualizer using an SDK that they may only have barely any knowledge with.

There are certain things that don't inspire the kind of passion it takes for volunteers to do this, and therefore it's up to those who have a financial motive to do so. Whether it be the rent-seekers at JetBrains, or someone other than Microsoft and doesn't have an incentive to make a competing OS more viable for developers. Without the .NET foundation's governance model and funding (regardless of who funded it), it would have never made it this far. See: https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/issues/5276

> Whether it be the rent-seekers at JetBrains

This is a gratuitously negative comment that is unfair and uses an incorrect metaphor. Rent-seeking is trying to charge for something without providing any new value, usually from something already established as free. I don't believe Rider was ever available for free, but even if it was, they certainly have improved it with loads of new value since then. You're welcome to your opinion (that I don't share) that their IDEs are not worth the cost, but you're also free to not buy them. That's not rent-seeking, it's the free market.

I personally am a big fan of Rider and the JetBrains Toolbox suite, and I get several times more value out of my subscription than it costs. YMMV.

My full toolbox sub costs less than either my spotify or netflix subs do. Move along.

Oh for crying out loud, you could not have chosen a worst company to go after for the accusation of "rent seeker."

Jetbrains has offered perpetual fallback licenses for all of their products for years now. This means that as long as you don't need any of the new updates, you can purchase it for a one time fee (basically the equivalent of a single year's license) and then you own it.

As far as their products not being worth what they charge, I pay about $180 per year (15$ / month) for the entire jetbrains library and consistently use CLion (for C and C++), Datagrip (postgres, mongo), Data rider (c#), Web storm (typescript), Phpstorm, and Pycharm. Considering these are the tools of my trade, that's more than a fair asking price.

They've also been incredibly responsive, especially considering the massive upheavals within the company as a result of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Whenever I've filed an issue on youtrack, it usually gets a response, and often a bug ticket that's handled within a few version iterations later at most.

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