Comment by ezst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezst | Hacker News Reader

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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)

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.

> 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).

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