alt Hacker News> But what do you actually get with IntelliJ? A massive, monolithic Java application that frequently hogs 8GB+ of RAM, locks up your system while “indexing pre-built binaries,” and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem.
This is just exaggeration. I use IntelliJIDEA everyday (on mac) with multiple projects open and tbh they have optimized the IDE a lot to make it faster. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's getting better. Also it's not closed source. The core of the IDE is open source (https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community) and for some specific framework support (e.g. Spring) are available on Ultimate.
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Completely agree. Also: some people enjoy fiddling with their tools, installing extensions and configuring everything until it's just perfect. Other people (most, I would argue - the proverbial "silent majority") want to get something that works reliably "out of the box" and has most (not all, IntelliJ IDEs also have plugins of course) batteries included. They shockingly are even willing to pay money for this!
Also, like where else would the indices live? They are in memory to make going to definition, source, analysis etc fast. It's not even using java objects for these, so a feature-equivalent solution would be similarly "fat".
This is actually not an exaggeration. Ive been using WebStorm when it worked well, then it became progressively slower to the point of being unusable even on small projects.
I've used InteliJ on and off for 20 plus years. It's progressively got bloated and slower, not faster.
20 years ago it was the fast lean option when there was Netbeans and Eclipse. Today it's ok, still good feature wise but fast and lean it is not anymore when I've used it for Scala oand Kotlin.
People will complain about 2MB ram usage and then gladly spend 4k on a mac pc
Quite ironic, given that Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" for the epoch hardware.
IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !
Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.