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Comment by laszlojamf | Hacker News Reader

I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough.

Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using vim or vscode used to ask me to do big refactors, because IntelliJ always got it right, whereas with the other editors it was hit-or-miss.

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This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords.

This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly maintaining it requires resources and people they don't have and would have to invest years of effort to replace. But that doesn't maximize quarterly profit, so it's left to decay and we get hourly LLM plugin updates.

I've used IntelliJ since 2004 and it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation. They've struggled with it since forever.

I don't think they've devolved at all. They've always been a mix of brilliance (far ahead of everyone else on refactoring and semantic analysis, etc) and challenges. And it has a lot to do I think with just being a relatively small team.

And the wave of LLM/agentic stuff has been a serious threat to them. Their efforts with Junie and the things before that have been faltering steps.

I do think it's beyond the point where they probably should just rewrite the core things they do in Rust. Their issue since day one has been it seems they're in a perpetual fight with the JVM garbage collector.

Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.

Saying that VS Code is terrible for Go is simply false. The Go extension is regularly updated and works extremely well. Sure, it lacks some advanced refactoring features available in IntelliJ, like function parameters reordering, but gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day..

I think OP talks about code navigation, which is objectively terrible on vscode in general

Sorry, but gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly - which is basic, tablestakes, "everyday" feature supported out of the box by Goland.

I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.

> code navigation

Do you mean GUI, keyboard shortcuts, search dialogs, all the above?

I'm frustrated with (find and) search. So many options. It's both too much and too little.

But what would something better look like? Spotlight (Alfred, Raycast)? fff (fast fuzzy finder)?

I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it.

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