Rider is now free for non-commercial use | Hacker News Reader

Rider is now free for non-commercial use

jetbrains.com

828 pointskretaceous422 comments

This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...

I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.

Wasn’t VS for Mac a MonoDevelop build with amputated Linux support rather than a version of Visual Studio proper? Or am I out of date on this?

It started that way but wasn’t been for a while. In fact the last version was a rewrite using native macOS controls and optimized for Apple Silicon. Sad to see it go but heard great things about Rider for c# development.

The newer mac version was actually showing huge promise. It was a couple of versions away from being a great choice as primary IDE. That said, I do understand why they axed it. The market would have been tiny for all that investment.

Shortly after the team managed to ship the 1.0 release of the rewrite, what a reward.

to be fair, I heard the team all got canned at the same time.

Yes, that is what it was.

Microsoft had continued to evolve it. And a few components from Visual Studio Windows were ported over to be common. But Visual Studio Mac was 100% rebranded Xamarin Studio which of course was just an evolution of MonoDevelop.

VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.

I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%

I mean, yes, VS Code certainly is great and all, but…

> It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is

no. From my perspective, it doesn’t even have 50% of VS features, and that’s probably a generous estimation. VS has lots and lots of features. Granted, many of them are irrelevant for most users most of the time.

Even Rider is lacking in comparison. It is very limited regarding debugging targets for example.

you have the dev kit installed and put your enterprise license in? whats missing?

As a regulär Jetbrains products user, I was shocked when I first has to use VS. Until today, I haven't figured out how to open a class by name (from any assembly), other than writing they name in code ans strl-clicking it.

Ctrl-T (or depending on your mappings, maybe Ctrl-P). Honestly, you can't blame the IDE for you not spending time working out how to do the basic stuff.

Visual Studio has come a long way (I've been using it since the .net 1.1 days). Out of the box, it gives you most of what you got from Resharper 2 years ago.

All that said, I switched to Rider a year or so ago and haven't looked back. I used to use VS for C# and VSCode for html/typescript/css, but Rider happily handles both. It's really nice to have one IDE for everything. And unsurprisingly, it seems to perform better than Resharper + VS.

> Honestly, you can't blame the IDE for you not spending time working out how to do the basic stuff.

Wasn’t the whole premise of JetBrains making different IDEs for different stacks that you don’t need to learn how to do the basic stuff and can transfer your knowledge from <insert dominant IDE for said stack at the moment>?

With my key-bindings it's ctrl+comma. I'm genuinely curious though. How did you figure out how to do it in Rider?

FWIW, one of the cool parts about the JetBrains ecosystem is that, almost regardless of the language/IDE you're in, the keybondings are highly similar. When I have to work in VSCode, I happily use the JetBrains bindings.

> VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.

Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.

> both Microsoft products

With 200K+ employees, at this point it is better to think of Microsoft as a city and different teams in it as independent companies in that city with employees that sometimes go out for coffee together :-P

> With 200K+ employees, at this point it is better to think of Microsoft as a city and different teams in it as independent companies in that city with employees that sometimes go out for coffee together :-P

As a former v dash, it was always amusing to see the proclamations come down from the mountain that basically said something like if you are using version x.y.z or below of so and so dependency you must correct it within n days. The people enforcing this seemingly didn't care what the application did or where you were in your software lifecycle, all they cared about was this dependency is raising a flag and we must fix it. :crylaugh:

Dealing with random compliance issues is literally 50% of the job for most SWEs at msft. Another 40% is spent fingering a yubikey and closing browser login tabs. Occasionally you can get some real work done on a slow Wednesday afternoon.

I thought this org diagram was supposed to be an accurate portrayal of how different teams in MS relate to each other:

https://i.extremetech.com/imagery/content-types/01b4upAMl7t9...

Not enough weapons, and some of them should be pointed at the user for the most accurate portrayal. Particularly around any team working on Copilot.

Tried vs code recently, remembering old vs.

Yeah not even in the same room of competence imo. Just a cranked up notepad++ in electron and with add-ons imo.

The extensions are how you make it a proper IDE. I use cca 60, makes it better than VS ever was.

Might as well use emacs at that point. :)

100% which is why I use rider :)

Actually you should take a look at Rider in that case. It’s about 120% of what VS on Windows is! I use it as my daily IDE for a production .NET back end. You won’t look back I promise.

It is embarrassing (for Microsoft) how much better Rider is for C# than Visual Studio.

To this day there is now Visual C++ developer experience that is comparable to C++ Builder for GUI development, there was C++/CX for a while (C++/CLI depends on C# for the GUI part), but then it was killed by an internal riot that pushed for the ways of ATL and IDL in the form of C++/WinRT.

C++/CX was deprecated and replaced by C++/WinRT in 2016.

To this day, to develop WinUI C++ applications, there is no built-in tooling in VS, you need to manually generate and merge C++ code out of IDL files, which have zero support on Visual Studio for syntax highlighting and code completion, unless you reach out to some third party plugins.

To top that, given the way things turned out, C++/WinRT is now in maintenance, no goals to ever move it past C++17, or improve Visual Studio developer experience.

I doubt that they feel embarassed by this outcome.

I haven't touched C++ Builder since mid 2000's. Does it still rely on the VCL? That was always the criticism I heard at the time. The VCL was written in Pascal and no C++ developer liked that it was not C++. It constantly got flack for it. The VCL was good at the time, but Pascal is more akin to C# in the way it does inheritance, so no multiple inheritance was able to be done with VCL components IIRC.

Yes and no, VCL is around, although it has been replaced by FireMonkey.

Multiple inheritance in C++ is a can of worms, unless you're prepared to deal with the related issues of virtual base classes, and diamond inheritance.

That is why after C++ all the languages that support multiple inheritance do so only at the interface level and not implementation code, or rather go with a mix-ins approach.

And in regards to Microsoft world, well the same developers that weren't happy with VCL and Pascal, and in for a treat given that the only modern way to do native Windows UIs in Microsoft world is via .NET consuming DLLs/COM/WinRT, unless they want to either stick with MFC, or the outdated tooling in C++/WinRT.

Yeah, the VCL was the first UI framework I used.

With regards to multiple inheritance, this was the C++ Builder criticism, not mine. That and the extra macros needed to support the VCL. I was a Delphi guy, so I appreciated that the Object Pascal version of using the VCL was cleaner to use than the C++ interface.

We no longer use C++ for UI. Any native code is wrapped up in to P/Invokes. I think all of our MFC apps are EOL now. Everything is WPF or Maui for cross platform.

Can it open VS solution and project files?

Of course it can, that's the baseline for a VS competitor lol

Well VS Code can’t open sone of VS project types, more specifically it couldn’t open the one based on JS and JS build tools. I’ll check with Rider.

It depends on the platform. For example, Rider on Mac will not open vscproj/vcxproj files, because it doesn't support C++ really on non Windows. But I think that is mostly because it would need to use a different C++ compiler and that is non trivial. I would imagine it would also struggle with project types that are not normal (VS extensions, installer projects etc) and C++/CLI as that is not supported outside of Windows too (and I think uses the standard vsc[x]proj file format anyway...)

Yes, it can pretty much do everything you’d get in Visual Studio.

The latest version can now even open SLNX files, which are the newest format that removes a lot of the stuff that makes VS Solution files painful to maintain in source control.

Don't forget Unreal as well - I've used Rider on multiple AAA Unreal titles that include custom engine edits and it is significantly faster than VS at loading massive projects. The integration is great and allows for seeing blueprint classes and references in the C++ project.

I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot of references, so I would occasionally switch to VS when there were a lot of references to search through, but other than extreme cases Rider is just so much more pleasant to use.

I had no idea Rider supported C++. My impression was that it is for .NET only. How does it compare to CLion?

Yeah they originally had a separate branch "Rider Unreal" but now it's part of Rider, C++ support seems mostly the same across both, except for project support. If IIRC Rider doesn't support CMake projects, but it does support vsproj projects, so if you generate vs files from cmake it'll load fine, but probably better to use CLion for any non-UE projects if using C++. I guess they're seeing it as .NET/GameDev IDE.

Honestly I don't know why there are so many almost identical IDEs.

I use both Rider (for mixed c++/c#) projects and CLion for C++ only.

I feel that Rider is somehow better than CLion at c++, even after CLion Nova (Intellisense based on Resharper backend) became a thing.

One difference is that I write boost::asio in CLion, and just vanilla C++ in Rider, and before Nova it was completely unusable with async code, now it's usable with async code, but after a few days of running the editor I end up with fatal IDE errors for CLion, and never for Rider.

> Honestly I don't know why there are so many almost identical IDEs.

Probably a reflection of internal organization to avoid product teams stepping on each others' toes.

JetBrains IDEs are all the same program just bundled with different language plugins. It would be like if you called VSCode by a different code name depending on which combination of extensions you had installed.

Not entirely. E.g. IntelliJ has a "project environment" modal (not sure about the exact name rn), in pycharm its part of the settings and a bit different. There are a few more things like this between the IDEs.

To +1 this: yes, they clearly share a lot of code, and have mostly-identical plug-in interfaces, and many dedicated IDEs have plugins for the more-general Intellij IDE.

And they present them as "just" a dedicated UI around the plugins.

But no, they are not actually the same. Essentially ever. The dedicated IDEs often have features that never make it into their plugins, and a lot of the UX and project structure/preferences/etc are quite specialized and don't always have equivalents outside it. You get like 90-95% with the plug-in, but not 100%, and sometimes that's a critical difference.

The plugins do have the distinct benefit of allowing you to use multiple in a single project, though.

If you open, say Android Studio (or IntelliJ) and start a new project, then open Rider and start a new project - the UI is actually very different for how the projects are managed. PyCharm is different too in different ways.

I think the differences are more akin to the old Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express IDEs vs Visual Studio. Visual Studio was always "everything", but you used to get the express versions that were "low cost" or free. They only had the single language in them. They were customised to just that language. This is what Rider is to IntelliJ Professional, except from what I understand, the plug-ins for IntelliJ are not always on a 1:1 feature parity. This can even be seen with Android Studio and IntelliJ Community. The Android tooling in IntelliJ Community is almost the same, but it does miss out some stuff in Android Studio. Because Android Studio is specifically for Android development, and IntelliJ Community is more general purpose Kotlin and Java development. I think the Kotlin Native support is slightly better in IntelliJ Community.

The CMake support in CLion is excellent. Visual Studio 2022 also has native CMake support but I find the CMake tooling in CLion to be much better.

Rider is much, much better than VS work unreal. And this is coming from a VS fanboy.

+1 for Rider for Unreal. Having it "just work" out of the box is incredible. Happy to be paying for it.

What does "noncommercial use" mean in this context though? These are tools for work - is the idea that students can use them for free and then will start paying once they finish school?

Students or OSS

But it was already free for students, and they have a partnership program with OSS which allows you to use it for free as well.

It was still a process. You had to have an established OSS project and go through the partnership process.

Now you can just use it for free for any hobby/oss projects without all the red tape.

You need to apply once a year and you need to be a maintainer of an active oss project for the oss license. From my experience they're very lenient in regards to what they consider active, but I don't think I'd jump trough the hoops if I didn't start using Rider with the student license.

Free for non-commercial offers a easy way to get people to use it and hopefully advocate for it at their jobs.

I did jump through the hoops every year and it's mostly fine, a 20m form filling exercise. I only had to explain one time that my project was still ongoing despite having a lot of seemingly automated commits.

Game jams, releasing game for free- that makes up a whole lot.

Curious where the line is if you're using it during a YouTube video that you have a Patreon for etc.

I think most games built never make money.

It's explicitly allowed to be used for content creation.

It means a wink, a nod, and perhaps a nudge nudge.

It means you can use them as a hobbiest or a student. For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project.

If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay.

Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial success.

I am a Rider fan so this is exciting.

> For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project

It's worth noting that even before this change, you can get the entire JB suite for free if you regularly contribute to a qualifying OSS project https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/.

I think the issue used to be that proving that involved them vetting you and I know that my contributions were deemed too sporadic. Which is chicken and egg - I would do more with a good IDE, but I can't have a good IDE till I do more. At least now, I can just do what I can without worrying.

Please tell me you knew such people existed prior to getting the correct answer above.. I'll sleep better

> I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot

I wish Godot's syntax for .NET wasn't horrible though. Its so nasty looking that it just makes me want to use their native language instead.

That's what I've opted for as well, and I have to say I prefer it. gdscript is a nice language for high level game scripting, and on the couple occasions I needed to bring in some high-performance code I found it super easy to build a gdextension in Rust.

Forget gdextension imo

Compile the engine from source and add your classes as a module. Cuts out all the gdextension glue code and then you don't need to ship a shared library.

Wouldn't this make engine version upgrades a nightmare?

No. Your game code is a new class, in whats called a module, which is fully supported by the engine. Your game code almost definetly relies on the same stable APIs that a GDExtension or GDScript itself uses. There will be no merge conflicts, no problems, almost certainly.

Note: We have a fork of godot that has some changes and fixes weve made and engine upgrades are still a breeze. Solving the odd merge conflict is not that hard, people do it all the time. Godot's code base isnt drastically changing from day to day. 3->4 only had significant impact if you were doing certain things with the 'visual server'... other than that even that was easy.

How do you write Rust code in that case?

You don't, but Rust isnt the right fit for gamedev imo.

I started a Godot project with C# support since I'm coming from Unity.

I now have at least 50 GDScript files and not a single C# file, the language is good (with types).

My only issue is that I can't get Copilot in their integrated IDE and that Rider's GDScript plugin doesn't support anonymous functions right now

GDScript is not good and never will be.

If it wasn't good then first, it wouldn't be shipped with the engine, second, people wouldn't use it to make games.

Honestly, I feel like this is a horrible argument when gamemaker still ships its own trash language too lol

The same reasoning can be applied to JavaScript and everything else where the platform offers one main language in detriment of others.

VSCode is also an option, with the godot-tools extension.

The solution is, of course, to not use Godot in the first place.

I really don't get why Unity, and now Godot as well, always end up with these magic reflection methods, instead of proper language design.

What does Rider add to the Godot dev experience? (I'm not familiar with either ecosystem, but I thought I recall Godot having an IDE when I last booted it up to play with it).

The Godot IDE is mainly around GDscript and is very basic. This gives you all the good tooling you'd get from a professional IDE, has best in class refactoring tools, integrates well with stuff like debugging, has a huge plugin ecosystem, better out-of-the-box suggestions and code completion, integrates with AI tooling, etc.

This is better than nothing, but I believe a Unreal type of license for their products would be much better. Like, if you do less than what 5000 euros/usd per month, you can use it for free, after that, you pay X per major version. That way I can start using it for free, and as soon as I reached some reasonable ammount of money I start to pay.

This is Unreal's license for those that don't know it:

* Game developers (royalties apply after $1 million USD gross product revenue) = Free

* Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) = Free

Another thing they can do is what they do with YouTrack. 1~2 devs, free, after that X per major version or Y per year.

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.

As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.

Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.

- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

I had a Rider license for a while but just let it lapse.

I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way).

I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.

VS Code is really good at certain things but it struggles on larger projects & doesn't have near the advanced features.

It's a very good choice though for a lot of projects. It's also a great way to try out C#. It has some amazing extensions for certain tasks too.

VSC feels pretty capable in my books.

We have a mono-repo with 100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript, 23k lines of Astro. No issues at all running it on a 2021 14" MacBook Pro with only 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD while also running multiple Docker containers for Postgres, Neo4j, Memcached, and LocalStack.

My take is that folks should not underestimate VSC; there are certainly things that Rider does better, but VSC is totally viable for modern .NET backend work.

100k loc is not big. That’s a small-medium sized project.

100k lines of code is definitely big and by no means a small project.

I’d say medium, edging toward small, especially for the .NET community

For enterprise .NET that's definitely small.

I've commonly seen enterprise .NET projects that are in the millions of LOC. And one that was over 10 million.

Just my experience, but at multiple companies, which are in the 50-70 employees range, their C# codebases were over 1 million LOC and I didn't get the feeling that they were exceptionally large or doing anything significantly different. I would put 1 million LOC as "medium enterprise . NET" which would place 100k in the small or possibly medium sized if there was significantly more LOC in another language that is part of the project that you aren't counting (eg. different web front-end).

It's not an all C# project; C# only comprises the backend.

All in, the mono-repo is somewhere over 250k SLOC with mixed languages (Vue SFC, TS, Astro, JSX, shell). So when VSC is loaded, it's not only handling C#, but also everything else.

Point is that VSC is more than capable of handling production scale, multi-language workspaces even on 2021 hardware with only 16GB of RAM.

It's not that VS Code can't load a large project, that is table stakes. It's that the tools it provides to work with those large code bases are like fisher price versions of the Jetbrains equivalents. If one take their tools seriously, and uses them to the maximum extent possible to increase productivity, reliability, and robustness of code then there is just no comparison between the two.

Don't get me wrong, I still use VS code for all front-end development and other ecosystems (such as Rust). But when it specifically comes to C#/.NET there is no substitute to Rider in my opinion.

What tools are missing? It has debugging, a test runner, Intellisense.

To be fair they're not a great comparison.

VS Code starts out as a lightweight code editor & via extensions you can turn it into more of an IDE but it'll take a lot of customization & messing around.

Rider is an IDE with all the bells & whistles already included. It also has extensions but they've built it with the most popular things already.

Refactoring, debugging, code navigation, formatting & hinting/suggestions are far superior in Rider. They have a lot more advanced features. Check out some YouTube videos by JetBrains to see examples.

Don't get me wrong - VS Code is still a great tool & I use it daily. I do wish they would have named it something other than "Code" or "Visual Studio Code" but hey, it's Microsoft. They're famous for terrible bad name choices. Maybe they'll make a copilot to fix that.

Rider is great for front end development too!

I have used it for angular and react and have had 0 complaints, it works great and the best is that I do not need to switch IDEs anymore

I haven’t tried cursor because I don’t want to “downgrade” to VS Code anymore.

my experience last time i tried it on a decent sized blazor project (about a year ago) was countless false errors and broken syntax highlighting to the point that i had to ignore everything and treat it like a dumb text editor like notepad if i wanted to actually get anything done instead of chasing shadows

I work on a almost 20 year old C# monolith, with 1000+ projects per solution. It doesn't even load in VS or VSC. Rider needs 16GB of ram, but manages to open it. I try to never close the IDE, as it takes 30mins to open.

What fan boy nonsense is this? The VSC support for c# is miles behind visual studio. Rider isn’t as good either, but it’s certainly better than VSC.

Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base?

This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC.

It’s a great editor; but not for c#.

The benefit of using it is absolutely zero unless you’re heavily leaning into the other parts of the VSC ecosystem (like a big typescript code base).

> it’s come a really long way

So has visual studio; and it started off better, and still is.

Rider is too.

I’m happy to die on this hill; if you’re using VSC for c#, it’s because it’s free, and perhaps good enough for some things; not because it’s better than the alternatives.

Even if you’re stuck on a Mac, I can't believe you honestly find VSC an acceptable editor after using rider.

All I can say is I certainly do not agree.

100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript in a monorepo.

I use it every day on a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/512GB.

Works completely fine to the extent that I just let my Rider license lapse.

Well, perhaps anyone who’s thinking about it can do their own research in /r/vscode and read about how much people love c# dev kit.

TLDR; it’s not just me.

I’m glad you like it and have found a workflow that works for you. I think you’re crazy.

My point isn't that "people shouldn't use Rider"; I myself had a Rider license and it's a GREAT IDE.

My point is "you shouldn't skip C# because you think you need a license for an IDE to be use it professionally".

Devs who are already using VSC for doing front-end and want to try full stack can absolutely do heavy lifting in VSC.

I let my license lapse not because Rider wasn't a great IDE, but because VSC is fully capable for backend and fullstack work.

    > I think you're crazy

I'll take that as a compliment :D. Even back in 2021 when I was invited to present at the Azure Serverless Conf[0], I chose VSC for my session to showcase that anyone could start developing .NET without expensive licenses (a common myth).

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/azure-serverless-con...

If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

Not trying to start an argument - I've never used Visual Studio with C# (I was a PyCharm user when I started learning Unity so Rider was an obvious choice) but I always assumed that Rider was better - because it was managing to survive as a paid product so it must have had an edge.

> If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

I'm pretty sure Resharper existed before Rider. Also, the existence and utility of the plugin is a mystery to me. I tried it once and it adds so many attention disturbing behavior especially in the bottom bar that I disabled it immediately. None of its feature was every needed in the company I work, and the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.

> the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.

I'm not sure that's a valid way to evaluate the utility of an IDE!

> why does Resharper exist?

I've wondered this for a long time. Last time I looked at the feature list, it seemed to consist mostly of stuff that was already in VS. The rest was stuff for which I could not fathom any practical utility.

Some people love it. When I've asked them why, they mention features that are in VS, but they just didn't know it.

So if you figure it out, let me know.

i like resharper just because it has some nice suggestions for cleaning up code that visual studio doesn't have. i probably wouldn't pay for it on its own, but it comes with the package i have for rider so i do use it.

>If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?

Back in the days there werent free extensions like Roslynator

"What fan boy nonsense is this?" Good way to start a VS fanboy post.

Personally, I have written APIs in C# from scratch to production entirely in VSC; your assertion that "It’s a great editor; but not for c#" is literally false in my lived experience.

Rider is also good. And since I run Linux, VS took itself out of my consideration entirely.

good engineers choose their own tools

otherwise, they are bad engineers, period

keep your strong opinions to yourself and don't be judgemental

you can, however, criticize their workdone instead of their tools

The C# dev kit plug-in improved VSCode a lot, but it is still under the same licensing as Visual Studio Community. So, you need an account to use it, and it is pretty restricted for commercial use without an MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. If you are using it commercially outside of the terms of the Community license, you are probably using it illegally.

Not using the C# Dev kit, the old OmniSharp stuff is miles behind Rider. It is really poor in comparison.

I've been a previous subscriber, but I let my license lapse after this announcement. I don;t really need to be on the "latest and greatest" train, and I can get my company to buy me a license if a new feature comes in that I need commercially. I have got a perpetual fallback Rider license, but I will also use the non-commercial licenses to do any OS work in my spare time going forward (which is mostly on Mac and why I had a paid licence initially anyway.)

I also expect this to put pressure on C# DevKit team, right now its purpose is to only be good enough to drive people into Windows/VS, eventually.

Rider is the only comparable DX to VS outside Windows.

What is the difference between Rider and Resharper?

VS + Resharper is painfully slow. Rider is refreshingly fast.

I recently upgraded my laptop and finally VS with Resharper is blazingly fast.

My old laptop was a an 8th gen i7 with SSD and 32GB of RAM.

New one is a 13th gen i7 with an NVMe and 64GB of RAM.

I suspect the biggest difference is the NVMe. It probably also helps that I’m using Windows 11’s Dev Drive where I’ve enabled all the policies mentioned in their docs to minimise the impact of Windows Defender.

And finally, so much RAM means Windows gets to keep a lot of my working files cached.

Certainly any poorly configure av scanners will turn even the best computers into a heaping pile of garbage. A lot of people abandoned windows development not because the platforms were bad, but because corporate av policy was always scan everything and the performance became unbelievably slow. Now, it's so extreme, you can't enev get a windows (or shocked, Linux) requisition in so many dev shops.

Rider is an IDE that replaces Visual Studio and includes the resharper engine built in.

Resharper is a plug-in that is hosted by Visual Studio.

Resharper in Rider is pretty much the same as in VS, but in Rider it is native and always feels snappier to me.

I use Visual Studio from work and personally subscribe to JetBrains.

For those developing commercial software on a budget, Visual Studio Code is an excellent option.

Although it lacks some features of JetBrains and Microsoft tools, pairing the .NET CLI with VS Code can still deliver impressive results.

if you can afford $10 monthly, integrating GitHub Copilot with VS Code can elevate it to a fancy, lightweight IDE

That's my exact workflow nowadays. The best text editing experience with GH copilot and lowest battery footprint makes using a VSC a no-brainer. It's especially nice since it also happens to be the choice for Rust, so I experience very little friction, not having to switch an editor and using capable CLI of .NET and Cargo.

For advanced scenarios Rider still rules, and this change is a very welcome one. I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse).

    >  I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse)

Curious in what ways specifically you think Go is worse than .NET and what contexts?

With discipline, it is both more expressive by having a better and more powerful type system, and faster by allowing much finer control over code execution, data layout and allocations as well as offering actual GC tuning options. .NET's compiler is much more capable too, and the rate of improvement is not slowing down. It also has much richer package for writing line-of-business applications productively. The main advantage of Go used to be and still is "culture". But once you apply such minimalism mentality to C#, it gives a much better end result.

Why battery footprint would be even relevant for day2day?

Do you develop outside?

both webstorm and rider is free now? why am I still paying. been a customer for years but all I used was rider and webstorm.

free for non-commercial use.

> - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

Wow. VSCode finally got them, it seems.

I think JetBrains is struggling a bit to land their next gen editor Fleet.

It came out swinging with a very early open beta and seemed to market itself as the coming replacement for all their IDEs, because all their IDEs would become plugins of sorts under the Fleet architecture, but have a dramatically easier API to develop against for plugin authors, be snappier, load quickly be less memory intensive etc.

From the looks of it now they changed the wording and messaging around Fleet as a longer term project and they seem to have gone back to mainly doubling down on pushing their bespoke IDEs, which ain’t a bad thing

Did that ever imply Fleet was going to be finished in the near-term?

Almost (or maybe even all) of what WebStorm does, you can do it in Rider or RustRover (which is also free). So it make no sense to not also make WebStorm free.

RustRover (Rust ide) is also now free for non commercial use

Oh. Very cool. Thanks for the heads up.

Sadly I cancelled my Rider subscription this year because AFAICT they've stopped supporting F#, it hasn't worked well for at least two years and has only gotten worse: crawling performance, lots of erroneous red squiggles, no IDE support for later .NET features. Maybe Visual Studio is better than it was a few years ago, but these days I just use emacs, and the MS F# team seems to prefer VSC over VS.

This is complete nonsense. Rider has first-class F# support and a sizable faction of employees internally who love and use it.

Do you actually use Rider for F#, or are you just repeating old wisdom? Your comment is rude and unhelpful, because I gave my direct experience as to why I stopped using Rider, and you responded with an empty platitude. Yet you did so in the most thoughtless, dismissive way imaginable, as if I was simply lying.

Rider was first-class a few years ago but has gone badly downhill, and it does not support F# on newer versions of .NET - or at least it didn't in June 2024 when I cancelled my subscription.

Webstorm is free but only for noncommercial use.

On a side note, if you code in JS/TS and you are a full-stack or backend dev, use PhpStorm instead. It is essentially Webstorm (+ PHP) + all the database tools. Those tools are one of the big reasons I bought their software with my own money.

WebStorm too

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

This is pretty huge since web technology has always been the “paid tier” for JB products

Oh that's awesome!

I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs - the way it understands code relieves so much mental overhead when tracing through my code, finding usages, refactoring, etc. It's one of the rare pieces of software I actually enjoy using. I just can't justify the cost for personal use for the amount I use it, and the fact that I've never really monetized a side project.

Super happy they're making this move. I think there's good logic to getting people hooked with free personal use so they can convince their company to buy licenses for everyone at work.

Hm... I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad sign.

I've been a Jetbrains user & proponent for many years, with most of my usage in WebStorm. But over the last ~2-3 years I've faced more and more bugs, some sitting open for weeks and months. Just for a short selection:

- The autocomplete popup sometimes froze the IDE completely (and killing the process caused minutes of data loss), open for close to a year[0]

- Since two months ago, the Typescript language server fails to start in Vue projects (due to a broken update by the Vue team). A fixed version of WebStorm was released yesterday, in the meantime you were apparently expected to search for the error message, stumble upon the YouTrack page, and apply a workaround[1]

- Performance is abysmal in a larger React MUI project, think 10-15 seconds for feedback on code changes, sometimes errors just stick around for a good minute or more[2]

- In some situations WebStorm makes autocomplete suggestions that aren't allowed - think effectively a type T with keys K | L, where Omit<T, K> leads to only suggesting K properties, while removing the Omit makes it suggest both K and L properties

- After updating from 2024.1.X to 2024.2.Y, the window had no buttons for minimizing/maximizing anymore. Now, this was partially caused by my environment, but after I found a workaround it was closed as "Third Party Problem". Still feels like a regression to me, since my environment did not change.

These are some of the more memorable ones from this year, but it feels like there's a new one every week. I'm pretty close to dropping my subscription, and this news doesn't fill me with confidence that the necessary investments in Q&A will be made.

[0]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-6171/Random-freezes...

[1]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-68756/Vue-LS-2.x-Co...

[2]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-59766/Very-slow-cod...

  I'm pretty close to dropping my subscription, and this news
  doesn't fill me with confidence that the necessary investments
  in Q&A will be made.

... or Jetbrains is trying to get more paying customers in, so they can get these issues resolved.

That could be the long-term approach, but in the short-term it will only lead to fewer paying customers. It doesn't help me if the issues start getting resolved in 2-3 years - the editor is barely usable right now, and I won't wait another year.

And should they actually lose me, I won't be coming back unless they make amazing improvements that are years ahead of any other editors to win.

Webstorm is now also free for non commercial use

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

I couldn't believe it. WebStorm is easily among the best IDEs for web work (some of my coworkers would say the best) today.

Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode?

I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?

I’m a PhpStorm user so not familiar with Rider specifically, but in my experience JetBrains IDEs are exactly that: Integrated Development Environments. Whereas VSCode is more of a code editor first and foremost.

There’s tons of overlap between the two, and for casual development VSCode will usually be fine. But as a professional I rely on IDEA to make a living, and it rarely lets me down.

95% of everything I could ever need comes out-of-the-box, so I don’t need to go plugin hunting (though there is a broad range of IDEA plugins too). In fact the IDEA plugins are cross-compatible, so plugins for Rider will work in PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rubymine, etc.

The refactoring is outstanding, and leaps beyond what VSCode can do it. Basically it just understands my code like a real developer would. Not just simply checking syntax, but understanding project structure, naming conventions, coding styles, and more.

PhpStorm gives me access to a full debugger, with inline breakpoints and execution step controls. “Find Usages” is incredibly thorough and even understands dynamic symbol names in many cases.

Also I get a full MySQL and Redis client, right there in the UI. I can click on strings which refer to column names in my code, and they’ll appear in the DB panel instantly.

At the end of the day these are power-user features, but I’m glad to have them and feel significantly more productive in a JetBrains IDE. Embracing static analysis and a full IDE was probably the single most beneficial upgrade to my skills and career.

I've tried VS Code and Haystack (based on VS Code) for writing PHP and I just couldn't stand it after having used PhpStorm. Basic things like copying variables, indenting, moving lines into if statements, multiple cursors etc. just aren't intuitive in VS Code when writing PHP and a lot of the things I can do in PhpStorm with the press of a button just aren't possible.

I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.

Last time I tried using Php with VSCode it couldn’t even do basic autocomplete or imports.

Granted it’s been 2 years but has it evolved since then even?

PhpStorm was superior out of the box as recently as 2 years ago, is another way of putting it

Superior: * Debugging * Refactoring

Specifically, out of the box, these things work, and work exceptionally well. In my experience you can get 80% of the way there in VSCode, but it requires compromise and time, which I’m personally willing to throw money at to make go away.

I believe the JetBrains equivalent of VSCode is Fleet, which is already free. In other words, their code editor.

They are completely different products?

One is an IDE, the other is an editor. If you want an editor, of course you will not be happy if you use an IDE

The claim that VSCode was just an editor seemed flimsy the day it was released. Now, it is absurd.

DE perhaps, with some effort. Not very I

It's difficult to quantify, but to me (large C# & TS projects) the difference between working in Rider vs VSCode is the difference between Notepad and VSCode.

The difference is big.

Also, often I think to myself "I wish feature X was available", only to find that it is and has been for a while in Jetbrains products.

I think I've only installed five plugins ever in Jetbrains. All for totally reasonable things like embedded development and debugging.

There's no real need for any plugins because everything I need for my workflows is included out of the box.

It even has support for build agents in docker or bare metal either locally or remote. It includes remote GDB debugging. I can with a single button launch a docker container on a remote server which cross-compiles, uploads the binary to my tablet, launches the app with GDB attached and gives me normal debugging tools including breakpoints and a console. All out of the box with no dependencies required apart from docker.

I've ditched PhpStorm licence quite a while ago after I stopped working with PHP. Tried using VS Code for personal JS projects, but I had to install a few plugins to make it more efficient and still having a strange issue on Linux, when Terminal panel is open, whole code editor feels sluggish. I don't really like how IntelliSense works on VS Code, but that's on me, as there's a plugin or some setting somewhere to fix it. Also VS Code creates several strange directories in my $HOME directory, even when running in portable mode. From application size perspective - VS Code is marginally smaller, and starts a bit faster than IntelliJ IDE. But SublimeText is even smaller and runs circles around big IDEs, not to mention how good it is at handling large text files. At this day and age it comes to personal preference. It is great that new developers have a wide choice of IDEs freely available.

For Unity, the integration just works and works well.

I've never understood the value proposition of vscode:

"Download an editor and install a random collection of dodgy looking plugins from random authors that will get you maybe 80% of the functionality you want

Enjoy watching the plugins downloading random .exes from all over the place

Any semi-advanced functionality is hidden in a complicated command palette system and a plethora of JSON files

Groovy support? Haha! You're funny

Need to view data in other format than a list/tree view? Get fucked

Good luck!"

> Groovy support? Haha! You're funny

Thank God at least someone speeds up eradication of this abomination from mainstream ecosystem.

Rider is so much smarter than anything Microsoft has made. It was much better IntelliSense-like features than Visual Studio/code.

My very personal opinion is that LSPs haven't contributed very much in the area of turning text editors into cohesive and integrated development environments that I enjoy using. One still gets to spend a lot of time and energy fishing for the right extensions, some with overlapping or incompatible scopes and capabilities. And this to be repeated for every project, framework and language. That's very ad-hoc, unsatisfactory, and the extent to which plugins can "do their thing" is generally superficial and limiting, setting the bar very low for what's possible to do (an example of that is how many plugins inform about their state via dumps of logs into ever piling and popping up consoles, this is very distracting and suboptimal).

The other paradigm is to have actual tooling and UX specialists having put time and effort curating a developer experience that is as smooth and distraction free as possible. And in my experience with the JetBrains IDEs, that doesn't even come at the cost of extensibility (you still have support, either official or community-based, for esoteric stacks and languages, and those can piggyback on the more sophisticated and adequate UX palette).

What should be the deciding factor is the resource consumption, then: if you end up with a less refined and less capable LSP+Extension enhanced text editor, it better be lightweight, right? Well, here again it's pretty clear that those LSPs and Extensions are everything but that, and not only JetBrains IDEs start fast (which was a big area of focus recently), they also respond better using comparable resources.

Just to be clear, I don't hate vscode, I have it installed, but the extent I use it is very limited because it sits in this uncanny valley where it's too bloated for one-off editing of small things like config files (for which I use vim) and editing whole projects folders (for which it's far from delivering as good an experience as an IDE)

> What should be the deciding factor is the resource consumption, then: if you end up with a less refined and less capable LSP+Extension enhanced text editor, it better be lightweight, right? Well, here again it's pretty clear that those LSPs and Extensions are everything but that, and not only JetBrains IDEs start fast (which was a big area of focus recently), they also respond better using comparable resources.

What kind of nonsense is that, lmao. JetBrains IDEs absolutely choke on our Java monorepo out of the box and you have to rely on huge hacks to make it work. While VScode works just fine and stays responsive while indexing in background allowing to move around and modify files without any lag.

And GOD FORBID you close it, open it again and be greeted with 30 minutes of “indexing”. Their tooling is so great, that they had to migrate their homebrew Java tooling in CLion to clangd (C++ LSP) based indexer.

Android Studio is another level of awful and if someone would release Kotlin LSP I’d migrate in an instant. But of course JetBrains won’t release it, because it doesn’t drive IDE sales.

> What kind of nonsense is that, lmao.

I mean, immense corporate codebases is the bread and butter of IntelliJ Idea and where it has a reputation to shine. I don't doubt that you are commenting in good faith, but the exact opposite of your experience is what most people have been saying about it over the years. Have you considered reporting the issue to them?

My experience of vscode LSPs across several languages is that they too use many GBs of RAM over time, just what you would expect from an IDE (and not from a text editor), while delivering pretty poorly feature-wise (unlike idea-based editors, I can't trust vscode to know how to rename variables across languages e.g. from models into templates/SQL, and that's a pretty essential bar to cross in my book).

Every time I decide to try a Jetbrains IDE again I give up after a few days. They're always eating insane amounts of RAM and lagging hard while indexing my code again and again and again.

Indexing is IO-heavy and does slow things down, that's the nature of it (and Windows is dramatically bad at that), but they have improved quite substantially in this department recently: whole indexes of large libraries/runtimes can be fetched from the internet so your computer won't be the billionth device to re-index the whole JVM, the IDEs are starting faster, and more features are being made available while indexing in progress (giving less of an impression that "nothing works" when opening a project).

The solution is to use an NVME SSD and stop programming on Windows.

NTFS is painfully slow for many-files type use cases. Unfortunately, many-files describes most codebases. Git clients on Windows are also painfully slow for this reason.

In fact I only use Apple Silicon macs, where the issue is still quite evident.

Not sure what to tell you, this should be solved on Macs. I'm pretty sure their SSDs are very fast. Although - be aware, the smaller capacity ones are about half the speed. They don't tell you that.

If you mean for .NET development, there’s still light years between vscode and this. Whereas .NET extensions for vscode are still in their infancy, Rider has been creating a comprehensive IDE for .NET to rival the full edition of Visual Stdio for years. We are talking full Solution file support, Nuget, majorly advanced refactoring via Resharper, pretty much everything you could wish for. And it runs on a Mac!

It sounds like you haven't used the C# extensions in a while.

VSCode has Solution File and Nuget support with the C# Dev Kit. Refactoring isn't bad either though not as featureful as I remember from Resharper.

Cool - vscode is nice and I use it all the time for other stacks, but - for .NET - relying on an ecosystem of third party extensions is never going to provide that unified experience that you get from a purpose-built IDE. Try both and you’ll see what I mean. The love poured into Rider is obvious.

Honestly ? It’s hard to describe. It just works. C# solutions ? You have them. Git ? You have it. Jira ? Integrated. Want your branch to be named after your jira ticket ? It’s built in. A missing .NET framework ? You can install it in one click.

You don’t have to install any plugin to be productive. Though there is a rich ecosystem of plugins but it’s more to allow you to install "bonus" integrations and features where in VSCode it’s necessary because you basically have to build your own IDE. If you don’t install anything, it’s like VS : open your project, click on build, it’s built.

Just try it, in the first start you’ll be asked which keyboard bindings you want to use, just choose VSCode and you’ll feel at home.

> I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any.

Start using JetBrains products - you’ll experience many.

And before I get rained with downvotes I’ve been using JetBrains on various machines for over 10 years. From netbook with Cameron and 2GB of RAM to M1 Pro and M3 MacBooks with 32 GB of RAM.

It runs on Linux. That’s enough for me..

So does VSCode though. Are you thinking of Visual Studio?

VS code compared to studio for dotnet dev is comparing a tractor to a trike.

I agree, but the comment you are replying to was asking for the differences between VSCode and Rider. "It runs on Linux" is not one of those.

It integrates all the components you need for Unity development very well (I haven't used it with Godot or Unreal yet).

The old saying: there are no IDEs, only code editors and Jetbrains products.

Replying to myself:

Interesting to see so many comments talking about extensions, and how you don't need to install any.

In vscode I only have the remote development extensions installed, and I think those come "built in" anyway. I just use a vanilla clean vscode install and its an absolute pleasure to use.

If extensions (or lack of) are the main reason given for not using vscode, then for me at least as someone who does not use extensions in vscode and just use it "as is", there seems to be no benefit.

I guess this lack of any actual incremental value to the average typical end user of vscode (i.e. someone who can just use vscode as-is without needing to install loads of plugins and customizations...) is why they are now giving rider away for free.

What exactly do you use VS Code for?

JetBrains licenses are one of the few software licenses that I pay for. Their IDEs have the features I need while keeping the UI from getting in the way.

I really, really wanted to like and use their IDEs (esp their Ruby 'intellisense' or w/e), but the lack of popular theme support kind of killed it for me. I wanted my IDE to look like my VSCode editor, but, at least a few years ago, that wasn't really possible since iirc there were only a handful of theme options.

They revamped the IDE a while back, it now feels much more VSCode-esque.

Theming has moved on a fair bit too...

They revamped the IDE a while back, it now feels much more VSCode-esque.

biggest mistake they have made in a while.

Arguably the 2nd biggest: the biggest was when they made that shit mandatory, in that I can no longer go into Settings and uncheck "New UI". The breadcrumb placement[1] alone almost made me rage revert to 2023.something since it was so instrumental to my workflow. Maybe by next Oct I'll have retrained my brain to look in the new location, but goddamn was it that important to them?

1: yes, I am aware of the Setting that says "breadcrumb placement = top" and I am also aware it does absolutely nothing. I'm currently too burned out on their process to open a YouTrack about it

You can theme it yourself without too much hassle. I like my dark mode to be black rather than grey, and just made it do that, and it just works. It took an hour or three to understand the process because I'm not a Java person and am not familiar with any of the tooling, but then it was super easy.

This was a few ago, so they may have improved that part by now, I've just carried my theme over the updates.

Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?

  It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy

If you are willing to trust their own documentation, there is documentation about what is sent with anonymous usage statistics in Jetbrains IDEA IDEs:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistic...

That said, if you mean "checked" as in checking for compliance, I don't think anonymous usage statistics are for that. For that they would need to not be anonymous. If they could identify who was improperly using the community versions, it would break the pinky promise of anonymity. (And for the record I personally doubt they are secretly correlating anonymous usage statistics, but if they were, using them for license compliance would involve either revealing that they did this or at least parallel construction.)

That all said, I think everyone will just have to form their own opinion on whether to trust their statements and whether this is acceptable.

If I had to guess, there probably isn’t any direct monitoring of commercial-ness in the IDE, but also guessing there’s Jetbrains employees watching for public statements that mention/screenshot a Jetbrains product and will contact the business if their company is not on file. Only need a few hits to make that worth while.

I have company laptop and wanted to try writing something in rust (I found this on RustRover page) but I believe this violates my company's policies. However TBH I don't believe that if data goes somewhere it cannot be deanonymised. I would be more comfortable with clear license "this is my project, you can see it and I am not using it commercially", but not with "you must allow us to send some anonymous data"

I believe IntelliJ IDEA IDEs have a 30-day trial. If you get the trial license and use that instead of the community version it should be entirely possible to never enable telemetry.

Though, I think this still requires contacting a license server (either at your company or at Jetbrains directly) so maybe that doesn't really fix the problem.

I wish they would allow opt-out for people who have a subscription active on one of the other Jetbrains products.

It's the dreaded T-word: telemetry. The same sort of thing people get up in arms about in Windows but JetBrains will get a pass here.

It's not hypocritical to feel different about different types of telemetry from different companies. JetBrains makes software I like using, and hasn't given me much reason to think they're being nefarious. Microsoft makes software I hate using, constantly betrays user's trust, shoves ads where they don't belong, uses dark patterns to trick people into using their services, ignores user defaults to promote their own shit, repeatedly installs software I didn't ask for, replaces working OS apps with shitty replacements that don't work and crash constantly... need I go on?

Windows exists to sell ads and Microsoft services, and no one can go anywhere because they're locked into legacy software, and Microsoft constantly abuses that position. JetBrains IDEs exist to sell themselves to businesses as a productivity tool. They benefit from making it actually good because no one is locked in and they have real competition.

Not to mention an OS has more access to my data than an IDE. If JetBrains suddenly decided they'd bundle a feature in IntelliJ where they constantly record my entire screen at all times, I'd be much more wary about their telemetry.

Its not telemetry its Microsoft + telemetry that people are up in arms over.

Catch JetBrains doing something dodgy enough and there will be a similar shitstorm against them.

Except in this case, Jetbrains lets you turn telemetry off and it stays off.

Mandating telemetry for the free version makes a lot of sense. They want to understand how people are using their software so they can improve it. Looking at how someone uses your software before they decide not to buy it seems pretty valuable.

But also I suspect Jetbrains management wants more telemetry period. They've discovered that they don't know how power users work with their software because they've all had telemetry off for years.

windows is a paid product with heavily-integrated spyware and adware

I wouldn't trust the psychos at MS to not murder their own families if it padded the bottom like a quarter of a percentage point YoY, you're comparing apples to axe murderers here.

I'm hoping it's on it's own domain and I can block it with my PiHole

Beautiful. Rider is an awesome a much faster IDE and I use it whenever possible. It is not practical for all projects.

The only behaviour that annoys me a bit:

- Double clicking an identifier should select the full identifier. However, in Rider (as opposed to Visual Studio) it is connected to the CamelHump setting - which is useful by itself. In Visual Studio you can have both CamelHump enabled and “double clicking the identifier selects the whole identifier”.

- Any startup project tasks like maybe a “webpack watch task” is “in the way” when stopping run/debug of your current application. A separate task runner like in Visual Studio would be beneficial.

- If a solution has file templates defined, every user needs to activate/select them manually in the settings. Quite cumbersome.

The pricing page says the Free version collects anonymous data. I understand the paid versions don’t. Does it say anywhere the kind of anonymous data that is collected in the Free version?

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistic...

This is also true of WebStorm now, too. Discussion on the announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128

There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users.

I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.

Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.

I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.

They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.

RustRover is free for non-commercial use though?

I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.

I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.

My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.

It's probably the most ridiculous nitpick in the history of ever, but I really hate the "sign in" button at the top right of Zed, particularly there's no way to hide it even through some configuration file. It's distracting to me and I want zero cloud connectivity associated with my text editor.

They have always done that when they make a specific IDE for a language.

The Material redesign makes a lot more sense now. I still think it's a terrible decision and a huge waste of resources though.

Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.

I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".

I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.

On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.

> the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors

Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.

I would add Wolfram to that list. All three have cracked capitalism.

I agree that private companies can be good and I use Steam a lot, but Valve sucks in other ways. Their community is awful and developers can have posts openly calling for their death or calling them racial slurs and Valve support will tell them they won't remove the posts. I don't mean they deny the support request, I mean a person will respond and say "Yeah manage your community better." This is despite the fact they give no tools for community management.

But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.

valve is nice but they're still taking a huge cut of revenue for doing extremely little work

I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.

People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.

my point is that valve/steam takes 30% "because they can". they could charge 5% and im sure still make tons of money. it's still a cut throat business, and while yeah they could be doing shittier things to make more money, i think they also do risk assessments on disturbing the golden goose

They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features

To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.

As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.

As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.

As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.

I think some of Rider is written in C# vs all Java for IDEA. Could that be it?

Their Resharper is indeed C#, only GUI is written using Kotlin.

There is a lot of praise here for JetBrains. I love their products, but sadly they joined the devcontainer race way too late and the condition of their products does not allow for serious development with dev containers. Their Gateway application is still in beta, and it doesn't always work, but it's faring much better than their early access devcontainer IDEs which are in a sorry state.

I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.

Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.

I'd been subscribed for the best part of a decade to their all products pack, liked the products, but they kept doing stuff that really rubbed me the wrong way in a paid product, e.g: shoving the AI offering down my throat and initially having no way to remove it, and then when I paid most recently, they sent me some spammy marketing for some third party product as a "thank you", and I cancelled my subscription there and then.

I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.

I was a paying customer for a long time, and their spam campaigns were the reason for my cancellation last year. Now I am a happy Microsoft Visual Studio Pro subscriber again. (happy in quotes btw)

It's a shame, I like the tools generally, but so much stuff is just about bombarding you with ads now, paying for a good tool is, to me, meant to be the way to avoid that, that really soured me on it all.

What is the problem you have with the AI? You can disable it, and otherwise it is run locally only. It does nice line-completion

At launch it'd pop open the UI every time you opened any of the tools, and you couldn't uninstall the plugin. I understand you can now disable it, but it was annoying at the time, and demonstrated the issue I had with feeling like I was being advertised to in invasive ways despite being a paying customer.

[dupe] More on official post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128

I like Rider very much, but personally moved to VSCode because of many little annoying bugs that aren't being fixed. E.g. typescript refactoring problems, .NET native code debugging from C#, TFS support etc. And maybe it's changing but I felt that the progress for new features and IDE maintenance stalled (for obvious reasons).

I have a very good perception of Jetbrains as a brand, even though I have only used YouTrack for some days. What I don't understand is, why do they have so many IDEs instead of a single one? Is it really necesary? Are language writting/editing needs so different? Honest question here.

For tighter integration. For example, pip in Python is very different from Cargo in Rust o $whatever in C and C++. They are purpose built and integrate better with the language and tooling.

I get that, but do you think it is so different that they can not have different modules in the same IDE? I mean, visualstudio, for example, supports all languages from the same IDE.

That's more or less the offering with Fleet although it is in Preview, it's just less stuff preconfigured

This is great! I found myself preferring the rider student license I had at home to Visual Studio we had at work when I was actively writing a lot of c# and some f# recently. It didn't feel fast outright, but at least faster than VS, and the memory profiler was much more immediately grokkable to me.

What makes it tailored for .Net and games? Does that mean it's less appropriate for other types of development?

For example, I'm using VS Code to work on a back-end based on Deno, which has a plug-in for VS Code. Would I find Rider a less-hospitable development environment?

It has plugins that integrate with Godot and unity. Otherwise it's just a regular IDE. It also includes a WISYWIG editor for WPF apps if you care about that.

Like VS, Rider will also do C++. In fact, CLion (their purpose built C++ IDE) is now running on Rider's backend. I'm sure that makes Rider very powerful for C++, but I haven't really tried.

Rider is bar none the best IDE I've used and I've been subscribed for six or seven years now.

Thanks! I'm just wondering what else it's integrated with. If it doesn't have JavaScript auto-completion and whatever else the Deno VS Code plug-in provides, it wouldn't be as useful to me for my current project.

As far as C++ goes, I wonder (based on the info you've provided) what CLion offers that Rider doesn't.

I really like their loyalty bonuses. The price for the whole thing drops down really low over time.

Have been using VS Studio for 10+ years and never used Rider.

What are the most compelling reasons to switch? I have heard lots of praise but little substance so far.

For .NET dev it seems hard for any IDE to rival VS Studio's tight integration with the whole MS + .NET ecosystem.

Rider is an excellent IDE for .NET development. A lot less bloat than Visual Studio 2022. I’ve had a lot of my dev teams switch to it. We offer them both options. If you’re not working in legacy .NET Framework apps then I’d heavily suggest giving Rider a try.

This is exactly the kind of surface-level praise I often hear but what exactly is it?

Is it objectively (significantly) more performant?

How does the MAUI app development experience compare?

Code completion?

IIS-integration?

Debugging?

Look and feel?

WPF / XAML designer?

File explorer?

Git integration?

...

It will come down to preference. The best tool for the job is the one you're familiar with. But if you've never tried Rider, I think it's good advice to try it and form your own opinion.

You might like the built in code completions, with the included local LLM. If you've used the Resharper plugin for Visual Studio, you might like that those features come included in Rider. Same with DotPeek, if you like to decompile dependencies to view implementation details. You might also like Rider's built in 3 way merge with magic wand to auto resolve easy conflicts.

If you also develop outside dotnet ecosystem, you might like that Rider has the same UI as Idea (java development) and Webstorm (frontend development), so switching between them is more familiar.

One thing I don't like about Rider is its inline type hints. I think they clutter the code and I usually disable them.

I haven't gone back to Visual Studio in a while, so I can't offer an honest comparison since my experience is a bit outdated.

(But to be honest, I don't really use Rider too much nowadays either. I've mostly switched to VSCode. So take this with a grain of salt. And apologies I didn't address the items you listed. I just wanted to point out the items I personally took note of)

It is definitely more performant in my experience. Occasional hiccups happen as well, but way less than with VS. Please note my experience with VS 22 is a bit dated because I moved to Rider a few versions ago (probably 17.8 or 17.9). Additionally, I haven't really used VS without the ReSharper plugin extensively so that's what I can compare Rider to.

Regarding your points:

> MAUI

No personal experience yet unfortunately on my part

> Code completion

At least on par, basically ReSharper with a few extras. Navigation and refactoring is great and comprehensive.

> IIS

Also no personal experience

> Debugging

Great debugger IMHO. Matches VS, predictive debugging is nice (deemphasizes branches it knows won't run), breakpoint conditions are great (only break on a certain thread, after another breakpoint had been hit, after n hits, ...), shows return values in the watch list automatically, etc.

> Look & feel

Probably personal preference: I prefer its more modern and focused look over VS. If you're into that, its Vim emulation plugin is superb.

> WPF

Not its strong suit. VS is way better here. Rider only has a preview. Annoying: it doesn't use themes for DevExpress-libraries correctly in one project at work.

> file explorer

Pretty much like VS

> Git integration

In my experience nicer than in VS. Exposes git's features more easily than VS. Take it with a grain of salt because I use the CLI mostly anyway.

I hope this helps a bit. But you're probably better off trying it for a while if you can.

Rider is a full-fledged, cross-platform C# IDE on par with Visual Studio (full version, not code). I have used a little bit of Rider and other Jetbrains products. It was some time ago, so take it with a grain of salt. On my windows machine Rider felt a bit snappier. Debugging was also great. Pretty much the same as Visual Studio. Code completion, code navigation and refactoring is at least on par if not greater with that in Visual Studio. Git integration is there, file-explorer is there. Haven't used WPF/XAML so don't know about that. Generally speaking if you buy the license for all Jetbrains' products to use WebStorm or other stuff they offer I think it is worth it. Or maybe you would want to develop C# apps on mac or linux then Rider is the go to. Other than that I wouldn't bother buying the license.

I am not sure why a C# dev would use Rider other than personal preference. But for a long time Visual Studio was genuinely terrible for F# and Rider was clearly superior: MS seemed to prioritize new features and .NET fads over stability and performance, and F# development had the worst resulting bugs. One of my projects from 2018-2020 couldn't even be opened in Visual Studio without crashing or freezing.

Sadly this has changed: JetBrains does not seem to care very much about F# these days, and Rider has similar bugs to what Visual Studio had in 2016-2020. It is a bad option for F# developers.

On large solutions I find Rider to be so much faster than VS.

On very large solutions I've found VS to be completely unusable.

Activation required. Still a nice deal.

Also looks like an online account is required.

They seem very ... concerned.

what does free for non-commercial use really mean ?

if you make a game, then it gets popular what happens ? or some .net api?

I'm always confused by such licensing terms e.g what ended up happening with Unity.

Are you going to sell the thing you're using Rider to build? That's commercial use.

If you're not going to sell it, it's probably not commercial use.

I think parent has an issue where at first he develops something he thinks he won't sell but later it turns out he has opportunity to make money on it.

My take would be, when decision to earn money one should buy the license for sure.

I don't think you can somehow pay for previous use and I expect no one will hold it against you.

But at the same time if you "develop non commercially" and you know you will be trying to monetize it most likely it will be hard to prove and no one has resources to catch every such case but remember that you become "big POS" for that.

I think an unsuccessful commercial venture is still a commercial venture.

They can be pity like that if they want but they shouldnt be surprised if they cant scale their customer-base anymore at some point.

Which is probably why they're beginning to change their strategy rn with this move ...

In my comment I am fully giving into that you can write OSS lib or some free to use tool with no intent to monetize and then suddenly you have to change it.

Not that I believe in that scenario.

I'm not sure about the letter of the law but the spirit is: if you make money off it, then buy a license. I doubt they have any way to know that your weekend project became an income generator.

Microsoft should’ve done a Google and Licensed the JetBrains IDE for .Net. Visual Studio feels like Windows in all the worst ways.

Rider saved me some sanity when I had to work with .Net.

Rider is by far the best C# IDE. Especially if you're not running Windows. It was a real lifesaver while working with Unity.

Well, I'd wager most C# devs are ... running Windows, so...

That maybe true, but .NET runs natively on Linux these days too.

I have developed projects using C# on MacOS with deployment on Linux Docker containers.

Unsure how true that is, but I certainly never did.

Rider is better either way, but definitely better than alternatives on MacOS.

Many developers have gratis JetBrains license on account of being involved in FOSS. I'm in that category - have to apply each year for a license by referring to (one of) my FOSS library(ies).

It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.

Is Rider nerfed as much as the free version of IDEA is? And if not, then why isn't there a free noncommercial version of IDEA? This seems like a smack to the face for Java developers that want to use the full version of IDEA for noncommercial purposes.

Full version of IDEA is "make your own IDE" since you can add almost everything from their other IDEs.

In a way, it was about time:

How else am I supposed to get convinced into buying it given the (probably more mature) default choice of VS Studio 22?

Reading about the rationale for this move this seems to be precisely their reason too.

Anyway, might try it out after all now given all the fuss ...

Limited commercial use 1 to 3 devs should also be freek as projects this small usually are just starting and aren't profitable yet. Beyond that, yes , it should be sustainable for the team to pay for commercial license.

No. If you have money to pay for developers, you also have money to pay for tools. Especially since software licenses are going to be a tiny fraction of what the developers cost.

What about 1 developer developing something for commercial use ?

They also offer a personal license, which I would say should be affordable to any devs if they were getting money. Rider is $149/year for the first year, $119 for second, and $89/year for the third year onward.

That calculation does not hold for developing countries. Rider's license fee is huge in countries with per capita GDP is a small fraction of USA's per capita GDP.

We should probably look at developer salaries / hourly rates rather than GDP. Most of the people in developing countries don't need IDEs.

But yeah, if you work for low rates, then you have to work more hours to pay for your tools.

> Most of the people in developing countries don't need IDEs

Most people in general, I would say. I haven’t tried JetBrains editors in a while, and the “developing country” definition is very unclear in my opinion (and also part of why I roll my eyes at the “what about developing countries?” argument sometimes), but I do think the yearly price looks good for WebStorm at least, as someone living in Colombia.

For reference, at the time of writing, the standard Netflix plan costs 26,900 COP a month, which ends up being 322,800 COP yearly. Meanwhile, WebStorm’s first year comes at 298,541.10 COP post USD -> COP conversion - it isn’t an insignificant sum, but if it offers significant added value, I think it’s a fair price, certainly better than the Netflix pricing. The second year is reduced to 237,967.54 COP, and the third to 177,393.99 COP - that last one is even less than what you’d pay for the Netflix basic plan over a year (202,800 COP).

I think it is a reasonable assumption that developers in developing countries earn much more than the per capita GDP.

(I say this as someone from a Newly Industrialized Country and I easily afford the all product pack)

This is like hiring construction workers, but not having money to buy them a hammer and nails. This ridiculous notion that software developers need to use free tools and neither they or their employer can't pay for any is very odd to me.

In developing countries , Rider's license fee is a non-trivial fraction of a developers pay.

I'm not sure how much money do devs in developing countries make, but I have a all-products pack license from JetBrains, and I pay around 20 EUR per month, which is equivalent to like 2 starbucks coffees.

If they want to grab market share they should include dotMemory to the free offer. Basically dotUltimate without ReSharper. Otherwise free Rider users will need to install free Visual Studio for enhanced profiling.

Well, these code assistant AI models won’t train themselves…

Can't neglect feeding the bot brains indeed...

For someone who just got into game development on Mac, this is very interesting. I'd never heard of this IDE before. Will give it a try.

You won’t regret it. They’re basically the industry leaders in IDEs. They also make JetBrains Mono, a fantastic monospace coding font.

good luck, they will expect you to pay $149 / yr even if you don't make a penny off your game

all the while you coulda probably just made it in VS code for free...

I wonder if construction workers also expect someone to give them free hammers and nails if they want to work on hobby projects. I doubt that. So maybe then software engineers shouldn't be so stuck up about not paying for their tools either?

unless there are competitors who do offer free hammers and nails (the VS Code of construction), I think your analogy fails

That's fine, and yeah, perhaps my analogy isn't the greatest. But if you're ok with the free tools, why complain about the paid ones not being free as well? That's ridiculous to me at least. The paid ones offer value to clearly enough people to still be in business, and if you don't find that value useful to you, then don't .. use it?

Btw, as a paying ultimate user for the Java EE features I was surprised how good vscode support for the same is. And completely for free

I wish Jetbrains could save me from Xcode. Please.

Same. Discontinuing AppCode was genuinely disappointing to me. Not sure if you can still download it, but it definitely hasn't seen a new major release since the 2023 version.

Apparently, not enough people thought like you. [0]

> While we’ve had some growth in terms of adoption, we didn’t reach the market share we had hoped for. We believe that the time has come to sunset the product and focus our efforts in other directions.

[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...

They had a Swift plugin release in June 2024 FWIW https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240-swift/versions but I'm guessing one would need to do some plugin.xml surgery given the compatibility range is locked at 2023.1.7

But who's going to save you from the Swift compiler? :)

Same, this has been a big struggle personally, as an engineer I try to be flexible with the tools I need to use, but I also want my tools to bring me joy, and Xcode brings me nothing but frustration

I'm thankful that I don't have to deal with Obj-C nor Swift in order to know if it would help your specific complaint but have you tried their Swift plugin for CLion? https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240-swift

I do see the /!\ sunset /!\ warning but until they actually do nuke it, it could still be helpful

Rider is much better and faster than Visual Studio, and it's worth every penny. Making it free is a great move.

I think it’s a bit worrisome that Microsoft can give away VS Code for free because they subsidize it in other ways, but JetBrains - a small software shop - clearly is being forced into this position.

Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.

I suspect JB know most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses (I‘m guessing), so this shouldn‘t cut their bottom line significantly, while simultaneously giving them a foot in the door of potential new customers. Get them hooked for private / OS projects, then sell them commercial licenses.

Agree, but some part of me feels uneasy with the idea that Big Tech can, and will, take any product somebody has put blood, sweat, and tears into, copy it, and give it away for free.

This isn’t a new problem, but every time I see some form of “free” it gives me pause.

While I don't disagree with your overall point, it seems worth pointing out that JetBrains has over 2,000 employees, so it's only small in comparison with industry giants, and that Rider has been successfully competing with "free" from day one: both VSCode and Visual Studio have been free for non-commercial and commercial use by individuals and small organizations for longer than Rider has existed as a product.

And Rider was built on IntelliJ and ReSharper, two products that successfully "competed with free" for many years before then.

So, if anything, I'd say that JetBrains is at worst reasonably well-positioned to survive dumping by larger competitors with more diverse product lines.

At 2k headcount they aren’t a bespoke vendor for sure, but the big tech CEOs can put that many people in a project at a whim, which is kinda scary to think about.

I don’t think JetBrains was forced to make Rider free. Their main customers are businesses, which still need to pay for Rider. Businesses also need to pay for Visual Studio (purple icon) if they have more than 5 developers. VS Code can theoretically do C# for free, but the free plugin is limited, and the paid plugin requires a Visual Studio license (it is mediocre anyway).

Is it actually faster than VS?

It is, in my experience. Especially with larger projects. And if you compare to VS+ReSharper, which is equivalent to Rider feature-wise, it blows it out of the water.

ReSharper is usually very heavy.

There are extensions like Roslynator which provide majority of refactorings at lower perf. cost, for free $$.

Rider is such an excellent IDE. This is great news for anyone involved in the .net world.

I'm learning F# and have been using VSCode. How different/better JetBrains Rider support for F# is?

Considering you get a better integrated environment rather than something designed more heavily around plugins you also get unquestionably much better refactoring tools.

One thing to note that I just learned: You cannot opt out of anonymous data collection if you use the free non-commercial license. (I'd probably still trust Jetbrains over Microsoft, but that's me)

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

I'd definitely recommend trying it out now that it's free. Your taste may vary.

Hi, I'm the maintainer for the VSCode F# support. Rider support for F# is great, that team is very engaged, and I'd strongly consider it if

* you have mixed C#/F# projects in a solution (C# and F# support in VSCode can't communicate today)

* you use Rider for other technology

* you want paid support for your editor tools

* you prefer IDE-style experiences rather than editor/ extension-style experiences

* you want to take advantage of Rider features like their accelerated build caching

I appreciate the honesty and straightforwardness in this post given your position. Thank you.

In my experience, Rider's support for F# is much more stable and usable than Ionide, or even Visual Studio proper.

VIM is free too. As is Xcode.

Any news about whether this will apply to RustRover too soon?

Already.

RustRover is already free for non-commercial use.

Oh nice I thought it was just while it was in preview

Anyone know how well this works with Godot?

Will this happen for CLion too

Now do CLion. I cannot stand using VS on windows.

Try VSCode + clangd. Much better experience.

No thanks. I do use VS Code when I just want an editor (i.e. I don't want my CMake & vcpkg files parsed). Otherwise I prefer CLion for CMake projects and use the real Visual Studio for C++ vsproj files.

Can I just say I absolutely hate how the grid layout is ever so gently not straight until you scroll passed it, and then when you scroll back up it's all like "no I was always straight, what are you talking about". Stop making me worry about whether I'm having a stroke.

Yea it's terrible, I don't get the point. Is it supposed to be funny and "get you"? (Genuine question)

Awesome news.

What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done.

It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/

> selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).

All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.

Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.

We expect to get paid for satisfying someone else's requirements. We do not expect to get paid to scratch our own itches.

That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.

Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.

I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.

The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.

> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.

Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"

The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?

Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?

Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.

Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).

I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves.

Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.

> Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude.

You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.

They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy".

As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay

And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.

Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.

My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.

This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.

If your employer allows you to pay for development software, they can get into legal issues.

Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.

And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.

It's not about having the means, it's about most companies having policies and processes structured around common software used by all employees in a similar position to allow for collaboration, and to ensure compliance with whatever governance and licenses apply. You don't see orgs where some devs can choose GitHub, others GitLab. IDEs are more interchangeable, of course, but each developer having to set up their own config from scratch (correct plugins, build config, testing framework, etc.) would be a colossal waste of time for no reason.

Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.

This seems to be what JetBrains has been betting on for a long time. Don't need to build a competent text editor if you can give management the right buzzwords.

Since it's a tool for writing code and not prose, it does not have to be a competent text editor if it's a competent "AST editor", which it very much is. Much more so than any alternative, commercial or otherwise.

Are you implying that JetBrains ides are not competent?

Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.

I think that may very well be the first time ever I hear Emacs called a "simple tool"! :L

It could be said that all it does is one task, interpret Emacs Lisp, thus simple

But then we would have difficulty explaining why that one task takes 300,000 lines of C.

I don't really know anything about it. In my mind it's similar to vim or vscode, a text editor where you can add lots of functionality but without the customization it probably doesn't do that much useful stuff for you.

I have access to both an MSDN subscription paid through my employer and Rider that I pay for myself. I use Rider over VS2022. Why? VS2022 is slower and way more flaky with Android development. Rider has Resharper built in. I like that I can use 1 IDE vendor's products for everything I need (Pycharm, IntelliJ, Rider, RustRover and Android Studio.)

I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay

Citation very much needed?

Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.

No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.

There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free.

And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.

Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.

There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.

People usually dislike bait and switch schemes.

This is where remembering the free-costless and free-libre distinction is important. Linux is free-libre, so it's natural that it insists on its dependencies being free-libre.

Free-libre is necessarily also free-costless, but not the other way round.

> Visual Studio

It's interesting that everywhere I've worked as a Microsoft shop happily pays for MSDN, which gives you not just VS but a huge amount of other stuff.

Perforce handles large binary assets much better than git. There are also paid for closed version control systems that are really bad but get used anyway, such as in IC design.

Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month.

Source: Myself

Every single time someone posts about some commercial tool, in a website dedicated initially to startups, there is always a set of replies with half-baked open source alternatives to use instead.

It's hard because developers don't usually have spending authority or budget. Often, nor does their manager or their manager's manager. To get the company to buy something you have to escalate to an absurdly high place in the org chart and so devs will often try to cobble something together out of free stuff, even if it's far less efficient, because spending developer time doesn't require permission whereas spending credit card balance does.

Unrelatedly, there's also to some extent an expectation that everything is free, even for commercial users. The most common pricing question I get about my product is "can't you make it free for commercial projects that don't have revenue yet", i.e. effectively asking me to become investors in their own venture. Because often they want to make a product company, but not spend any money to do so.

Source: I run a small software company that sells to developers.

Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.

Did they have Russian developers and let them go? Or do you mean the ownership has changed?

My understanding is they relocated the developers who were in Russia

Correct, though they also lost some who were not willing to relocate.

That's really too bad, and not fair to the Russian developers. More 'collateral damage' from the NATO-Russia conflict.

Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees.

His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.

Ukraine is not part of Nato, but that would have been a good way to avoid 'conflict'.

> More 'collateral damage' from the NATO-Russia conflict.

What has NATO to do with Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Many tech companies that had large dev teams in Russia have mostly relocated them. Acronis is another example of a company that was originally entirely Russian that is out of the market completely, and from what I heard, well over 90% of the devs relocated.

It will be very interesting to see the effects of that brain drain long term.

I always thought the company was Czech? Though I think the founders were Russian nationals.

I guess it depends on what you consider a "Russian Company".

As a British national living in the USA, does that mean if I start a company it'll be a "British Company" forevermore?

Before 2022, their de-facto headquarters and most of their employees were still located in St. Petersburg, even though the main company was registered in Prague.

Kudos to Jebrains basically gifting Rider to Russians making it free of mandatory license and possibly malicious cracks

> Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company.

The heavily populated parts of Russia, including the part where JetBrains was operating, are in Europe. (Russia’s not part of the EU, obviously, but “European” and “EU” don’t mean the same thing.)

It is the new Borland, hopefully they won't follow into the Inprise phase.

This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well.

Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.

I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.

A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free.

I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.

I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.

>> I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.

This is exactly the reason. When people use both VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs, a huge portion of them will end up becoming a Jetbrains user, and on someday, some of them can become paying customers

VSCode infrastructure is pretty broad and the community is pretty large. I only use it to make light code edits here and there but I would never put my whole project in it.

>>I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box. Same here, the only plugins I installed were themes :)

I prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.

I respect your opinion and what you said makes sense. That said, I find myself only ever using VSCode for "light" edits since it is somewhat faster to open and close from the terminal.

Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.

Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.

I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0].

I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently.

[0] This is explicitly allowed: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...

Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.

Yes, devs are explicitly allowed to use any editor they want. I'm not the only one who brings my own JetBrains, but I'm in a tiny minority.

This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed

This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top.

It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.

I do pay for software, even subpar ones like Telerik's controls, for a while.

I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself.

Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free.

I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.

They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.

It was founded by russian nationals but the company is formally czech and is more connected to the west than to Russia.

The majority of employees and C-level are russians. It is a Russian company.

Czech

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains

Majority of employees are russians including the C level

they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...

> The Czech Republic is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the OECD, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group.

The company is not czech. Russians are an overwhelming majority of the employees.

A country that was aligned ideologically with USSR is an understatement. They were under occupation as a satellite state. Those people did not sign up for communism in 1945 willingly.

However, be careful with the terms of non-commercial usage (Enforced heavy metrics)

"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."

"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."

https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...

Not just that, they will do some yucky things to exfiltrate data from your network to enforce this.

I have loved JetBrains ever since I entered their ecosystem for the End of the World Sale in 2012. As a professional developer, I need my tools to work for me and not against me. That is why I pay for these tools and I appreciate JetBrains' consistent iteration on making them even better.

I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.

I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.

Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.

I loved JetBrains IDEs years back.

These days I am mostly using NeoVim.

I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.

I would gladly pay them money even if I don't use their IDEs if only they provided a good language server.

I wonder though, do you expect good LSP to be available for commercial use free of charge?

No, it's fine if I have to pay (but I said as much in my initial post, didn't I?).

A kotlin project paid my bills for a long time, so I am totally fine investing 200bucks/year.

But I don't want to use IdeaVim anymore, I want the real deal NeoVim, configured how I love it!

> I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.

They’ve been awful stewards of the language despite investing so much into it.

The design of the yellow/black cells holding language/tech tripped me out for a sec, on my laptop they're all crooked at the top but align themselves after a certain amount of scroll. Thought I was seeing an optical illusion but a refresh shows that it's not. I don't think this was intentional.

What on earth is up with that? It's not just you. It happens in both Chrome and Firefox. After a very small amount of scroll it goes away?!?!

I see specific classes on the page that specify a one degree angle, so it seems to be intentional. I would guess it's to call your attention to the cells.

The one degree angle, while a little unusual, isn't what blows my mind. It's the disappearance after a small scroll. That's enough to make you think you were imagining things, might need to go to the eye doctor, etc...

Sounds like they got a big present from Microsoft.

No, they're feeling pressure from VSCode (which is primitive in comparison, but good enough for most people). Thus the new theme (which none of the old users asked for) — total clone of VSCode UI, and this announcement. It's the opposite of what you're thinking.

Not sure which version of VSCode you think the new UI is a clone of, but I don't really see it. The tool buttons? VS has always had those, thought they had text by default. Tabs? VS has those too. Bottom bar? VS also. In fact, Rider looks like all the other Jetbrains IDEs - except Fleet, which is actually their VS Code competitor.

I agree. Definitely pressure from VSCode. I did a number of .NET projects with VSCode. It's indeed very good.

Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?

All Products Pack (12 IDEs, 3 extensions, 2 profilers)

first year - $289.00 (+$116)

second year - $231.00 (+$58)

third year onwards - $173.00

you're locked in because of an extra $116 the first year and $58 the second year?

https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye...

They may mean that they're locked into continuing the subscription to keep getting updates because if you have a break then you start at the high price again.

Whenever you don't renew you get whatever version was out when you last renewed in perpetuity which is great. But if you decide you don't want it this year, but in two years you do, now you're back at the $289 price. Though if you pay $289 every other year you're still coming out ahead compared to an annual subscription so I don't know what the issue is.

They're rewarding recurring customers, this is not a vendor lock-in.

That’s of course the way they would try to frame it positively… but imagine it any of your other subscriptions did the same? Once you’ve been subscribed, it puts a much higher cost on unsubscribing, especially if you aren’t using it but think you might need it again at some point in the future.

If you don't care about the annual updates, the subscription is actually more expensive than just paying for it every other year or less frequently.

Because you get a lifetime license for the latest version available when you pay, so you're getting less value the second year you pay since you're just paying for updates.

You can choose to pay every 3 or 4 years rather than yearly if you don't want to be locked in, but it will come out as a similar cost overall

Uhhh no. Lock-in seems like hyperbole given that you can migrate over to any other IDE. And, especially given the fact that when you purchase an annual subscription, you were given a perpetual fall back license - meaning you can continue to use that version long after your subscription has lapsed.

Note that you will still have to pay for the AI support, which is presumably a major factor in this strategy.

ie. How many devs will really use it in it's "free" state as titled? Fewer and fewer I suspect.

I'm sceptical about the prevalence of non-AI-centred-IDEs going forward - we live in a new era now - and I guess JetBrains have also come to that conclusion and this is a pivot to support the thesis.

I don't care about AI support at all

If anything, not having AI is a bonus in my book.

Fair enough, but I think that will be a minority view going forward; it has already become a core functionality across the industry, and that is what Jetbrains et al have to contend with.

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