Moving PHP open source forward | Hacker News Reader

Moving PHP open source forward

blog.jetbrains.com

63 pointsmikece53 comments

> Our strategy from now on is to sponsor around five open-source projects and maintainers per year. Each year we’ll select new projects to diversify our support.

I like this! Keeps the community engaged.

Looking at their list, seems solid. I have high expectations for Mago specially. Currently, PHP static analyzers are good/great. But speed can be an issue in large codebases:

1) Saif Eddin Gmati, who’s building a very promising new linter and static analyzer for PHP in Rust: Mago.

2) Markus Staab, who’s involved in tons of existing open-source projects like PHPStan, Rector, and PHPUnit.

3) Kyrian Obikwelu, who’s actively exploring AI and MCP possibilities in PHP.

4) Sjon Hortensius, who’s responsible for 3v4l.org, an online shell for PHP that’s very popular within the PHP community.

+1 spot open

It’s great to see JetBrains giving back like this …

The Raku language community has put a lot of effort into IntelliJ support, initially the Comma plugin was supported by Edument and then it was passed to the Raku Community where it is actively supported … now renamed Raku IntelliJ Plugin (RIP - geddit?)

Tools like the Grammar inspector and debugger fit well in the IntelliJ UI model.

https://raku.org/nav/1/tools

And here I thought they're finally releasing community edition of PhpStorm.

Both Saif and Markus are excellent choices for sponsorships. Kudos to whoever picked them. It’s a shame Juliette is losing hers, she’s also a really valued member of the PHP community and has been for a long time.

I have a lot of respect for JetBrains.

They are bootstrapped, doing $400M+ revenue, and selling to one of the hardest segments (developers who are notoriously frugal).

>selling to one of the hardest segments (developers who are notoriously frugal).

But they don't sell to developers, they sell to suits high in the food chain of a corporation.

I know many developers who buy Jetbrains licenses from their own pockets.

I'm one... I was introduced to JB by someone else who paid out of their own pocket 18 years ago. I thought he was crazy... then a couple years later I tried it in earnest and it was ... life (well career) changing.

Out of curiosity: do you know why they pay for it themselves instead of asking their company to do so?

Because not all "developers" are developers in their day jobs. I'm personally a sysadmin most of the time, and I do my own R&D (mostly academic, but novel).

Some tools I like are not free, and I buy licenses by myself.

Cause many developers have personal projects they cant use company resources on

TBH even that can be a hard sell at times

I'm paying for their IDEs out of my pocket since 2012

I bought my first Jetbrains license when they had an end of the world clearance sale. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2012/12/20/jetbrains-end-of-...

... and haven't let it expire since.

Totally agree. And so far they haven’t enshittified their products. Prices are ok and licensing terms are ok.

They also are the rare example of a company that actually left russia (even more impressive because the company was largely russian) unlike western and eastern companies that published some press releases, but still continue to work and collaborate with russia. Even the "privacy first" Apple continues to remove any app the russian government asks and pays millions in fines.

I'd sooner pay for vscode, it's much faster even though it's an electron app. Good job Microsoft (rare)!

VSCode has started to aggressively force its AI slop stuff down my throat, which has turned me off from using it. JetBrains, thus far, is much less aggressive with its AI offerings. And while yes, everything can be turned off, just like all the adware and spyware in Microsoft Windows can be turned off, I'm just not interested in using a product whose defaults are _this_ anti-consumer.

Can't really agree since I use.. Gemini Code Assist there (obviously due to its generous free quota). GitHub copilot - at least in my case - needed to be manually configured, so I'm not sure which feature are you referring to.

I'm referring to NOT wanting AI in my code editor, nor any dialogs, sidebars, popups or ads of any kind for AI offerings.

VSCode doesnt even come close to the features PHPStorm provides. It's fine if you prefer it, but the comparison is totally unbalanced.

100% in agreement, but then again I often wish I could strip out like 60% of things in PHP Storm such as the database engine, AI stuff, docker integration, VCS client, or code-with-me which I never use and take up valuable interface and resources. I prefer specialised apps such as Sequel Ace, GitHub Desktop, Docker Desktop and such.

Most of the things you listed are plugins which can be disabled in the plugin settings - certainly databases, docker & code-with-me.

OP specifically mentioned performance ("faster").

Jetbrains have a code indexer which is what slows things down at launch. After that, it’s fast. Also I have those things opened for days. Emacs’ uptime is 7 days now (I restarted it to revert a config changes, the mbp itself is up 35 days).

VSCode with clangd is supersonic compared to CLion with clangd-indexer.

Indexer only actually runs if you update the IDE, otherwise it does incremental update on the changed files, which even if you switched to a branch with many changes is usually instant (or too short to realise it's happening). They optimised indexing a lot over the years.

You're comparing apples and cars, making your comment kind of hard to interpret.

Anyway, you should use vim instead.

Intellij IDEs are notorious memory and CPU hogs. I can't recall a single time where I opened up Intellij and didn't feel any sluggishness or stutter. It's like a huge excavator that does the job, but in such inelegant way that it kills all the joy when you use it.

VSCode/VSCodium with focused extension fly compared to any Intellij IDE.

Code indexing and static analysis are not cheap. Which is what you usually want in an IDE.

I've had phpstorm get stuck indexing until I shut the app down, no matter what Stack overflow voodoo I tried to break the cycle.

Vscode and intelephense handled the same project without breaking a sweat.

I've had much better experience with IntelliJ. No matter the maven or gradle project I've thrown at it, it just works.

I have code indexing in vscode (in cpp at least) and it's still faster. In contrast, Android Studio makes my laptop fan go crazy even after opening a hello world app..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45450870

That's not my experience. File access seems to be the main source of sluggishness, and it's temporary.

What operating system are you using?

That's nice, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440117 (also from today) isn't very nice.

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times...

They announced a price hike recently, and now this. I might not feel like renewing my license in a few months, actually.

I keep expecting them to be acquired by someone... with Microsoft being the most logical acquirer so they can go platform independent and shut down Visual Studio (finally).

Microsoft Rider would be welcome.

Visual Studio still would still be kept on mantainance mode for 10 to 20 years because of there's so much critical enterprise infrastructure that depends on it.

As more of that migrates to DotNet Core, it’s less and less reliant on Visual Studio (the behemoth).

It's a bit harder to acquire a profitable company that isn't publicly traded and wasn't VC funded ( Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466304 ).

I find our community's take on paying for IDEs interesting. We're now willing to pay 20, 100, 200 USD a month for AI subscriptions, but wince at paying that for IDEs that clearly add value and also save time. I'm also frugal, but Jetbrain IDEs have been easily one of the best investments I've made for dev tools.

Agreed. We used to balk at $300/yr subscription but here we are forking over almost that much a month. Granted, I’m more diverse with AI than without it but still. I’m with you, best subscription I ever made.

I was puzzled by that at first, but I think it makes sense if you think about it this way: we made the IDE work (including all the magical AST transformations), but the AI does work on our behalf.

Paying for an IDE is fine. Letting them train their AI on your code isn't. I don't have the rights to give access to third parties. What I'm working on isn't even anything special, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't have permission to give JB access to it.

Edit: I misread the non-commercial bit. Regardless, I making it opt-in by default is scummy, imho.

How much do you trust them to keep it to "just" non-commercial though...

A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

If you have a subscription then it’s opt-in.

That seems perfectly reasonable.

If you ask if you want to opt-out, then why isn't it opt-in which would be the definition of that...

Because they know, like everyone else, that opt-out results in more people not opting out.

Again, this is for the people using JetBrains IDEs for _free_. You can pay for a subscription and it becomes opt-in. I think it's completely reasonable for it to be opt-out or even required for the free product. Giving non-paying people a choice is a step above what I feel they are required to do (morally, ethically, etc).

> A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

Not sure what I'm missing with spacemacs + LSP compared to vscode. (Spac)emacs does not train on my data. I don't pay for spacemacs.

Let's improve "Open source". Not Open-sourcing our product...

I'd rather customize vscode with extensions.

Their core platform and some basic language plugins (Java, Python) are open source.

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community Here's the product, open source. There's proprietary stuff on top for Ultimate, but community is right there.

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