Hacker News Reader

Comment by toprerules | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Vim user, but I occasionally try JetBrains/VSCode to see what I'm missing out on and RustRover, CLion, Goland etc. are by far the most sluggish pieces of software I've used. I am demonstrably slower on them than using Vim with my fuzzy finder, LSP, and AI integrations.

I thought Fleet might add the "magic" to something more VSCode like, but I also don't understand the long term vision.

View on HN

Same. Although I haven't tried VSCode in a lot of years. I did at one time have it set up to emulate vim quite well. I used it as a daily driver for over 6 months. It would puke the bed at least once a day, reseting the theme, losing all keyboard shortcuts. I'd restart it and go on my merry way.

I keep my Kotlin LSP for NeoVim up to date but it's just not a great experience. I often have to open IntelliJ to sort out import issues. The entire Java community is built on "don't worry about knowing where your imports are coming from, your IDE will do that magic for you". So much is this the case, that the first Manning Kotlin book even said it. Because of this, I was eager to give Fleet a shot. My impression was, "you won't build an LSP because you're afraid of losing revenue... but you'll build this?" Ok. I guess that makes sense - keep people on your playground.

I sure do LOVE Kotlin as a language. But telling me I have to use your product to write it? I'd rather write Go... or even Typescript at that point. Both of those have really nice experiences in a simple text editor + LSP.

Concur. I find that RustRover and PyCharm are outstanding in terms of refactoring, introspection, and treating projects as unified. But they are so slow. Lately, even copy+pasting may take seconds or longer. This and other actions sometimes terminate with an error about being too complex.

Can't I have both power, and responsiveness?

IntelliJ IDEA is their real product. Once you've added a debugger, test runner, and decompiler then you're ready to program Java.

Pretty sure IntelliJ comes with all those things?

That's why I use JB products. I download them, start them up and that's it. I don't need any separate plugins, they just work perfectly out of the box.

Also probably part of the reason why they're so bloated. IDEA with just a single mid-sized project can and will take 10GB+ memory (simple java+gradle for spring or android). Out of the box it has ~100 plugins installed, most of which are useless for most people.

It does work well but it's often too much and uses even more memory than vscodium.

Are you using the ram for something else? Would you prefer to have 30 out of 32gb sitting unused?

Ram is cheap, I don't see why people complain that it's being utilized. Doesn't bother me at all.

I haven't looked into it but I would assume you can disable these unnecessary plugins if you don't want them?

It sounds like your perception of how a computer works is incredibly flawed. ram doesn't sit unused, the kernel uses it for caching and locality. The more RAM you give the kernel, the more you can have resident in the slab cache, the page cache, the filesystem cache, the network backlog, etc. Even on very large machines with more RAM than an average desktop, the kernel can still make use of almost all of it.

I work on efficiency so when people say things like "it's ok for my IDE to be an inefficient pile of garbage that locks up resources" it makes me wonder what kind of program they are producing.

I didn't say it's an inefficient pile of garbage. It's obviously making use of the memory in order to provide information and quick navigation etc.

My computer works completely fine while I have multiple jetbrains ides and browser windows, Docker etc running.

So maybe your perception is the one that's flawed. I know for a fact that my computer can handle it, but it seems like you mistakenly believe that it can't?

You're both right. The issue here is that both the JVM and the kernel use algorithms that can use all your RAM to speed things up, and there's no good way to know which side should 'win' (to get the best performance).

Historically the JVM will happily use all your RAM even if it doesn't need to, because that reduces the amount of GC work required which increases CPU time available to the IDE for analysis and other tasks. It can be told there's a limits, in which case it'll spend more time GCing to stay under it.

Modern JVMs changed this old default and will wait until the app is idle then start reclaiming memory and releasing it back to the OS. I guess it depends what you mean by "mid sized" but 10GB is quite a bit. It'd be worth checking that everything is running on a recent JVM. Gradle in particular can be a hog if you run it on old JVMs.

I use Rider for .Net and WebStorm for JS. Before I left work I checked, with our small/medium sized project each of them were using a little under 2gb according to windows Task Manager. Adding in some other related processes I'd estimate the two combined might be using 5-6gb in total. So I have at least 26gb left over.

To quote Lord Farquaad: That is a sacrifice I am willing to make

Reply on news.ycombinator.com