It's a bit strange to project a personal experience with one product onto all other products by the same vendor, even if those products use shared platform parts. Not to dismiss your claim, it's just IDEs (code engines specifically) are naturally pretty complicated pieces of software, so the experience may vary.

The claim that 8Gb RAM is required just for Intellij seems to be at least overgeneralization (also depends a bit on how you count RAM usage; e.g. do you count all mmaped files as RAM usage even when pages are not loaded?). Can be true for some projects, but I've been working on decently sized Java/Kotlin codebases (~250k locs) with way less RAM allocated for Intellij (again, your experience may vary). Even Intellij and Kotlin projects themselves have been usable with less memory, at least some time ago.

What's more baffling, though, is how an LSP would be significantly better if it is based on the same IDE core, just running headlessly? I think there may be an independent non-IDE based LSP for Scala, but both Java and Kotlin LSP are based on existing IDEs engines (Java LSP is based on Eclipse engine, Kotlin LSP is based on Intellij).

A quote from the kotlin-lsp GitHub repository: > The language server is based on the most recent IntelliJ IDEA version and proprietary parts of JetBrains Air and Fleet products, making it partially closed-source.

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp

Counterpoint: use intellij on full stack apps with cdk, react, sqls and whatnot, multiple open at a time, without any problem.

I've got Android Studio open now, while also working in several PyCharm projects, IntelliJ and WebStorm. No issues at all on macOS.

I feel the same about VS Code, it's probably some of the plugins but sometimes, especially when LLMs make edits, memory usage explodes until my system breaks down and force pauses some apps until I kill some of them.

I should go back to Zed, maybe use the CLI interface for agentic programming instead of the UI.