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In my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lig

by _bxg1 6y ago

In my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lighter. Even IntelliJ and family - supposedly the state of the art in Java apps - feel like mud on a brand-new 16" Macbook Pro.

eyegor 6y ago
Interestingly they seem to run exactly the same on horribly low spec machines. I blame the jvm's love for boxing and unboxing everything in IL land. Of course by now I'd hope it's less wasteful - last I spent serious time in Java was 2015.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nv-vn 6y ago
I've definitely noticed the same on IntelliJ but weirdly enough Eclipse feels just fine. IIRC both are written in Java, so maybe it comes down to the design of IntelliJ moreso than the limitations of the JVM?
- _bxg1 6y ago
  I used Eclipse for a while before switching to IntelliJ around ~2015 and it actually seemed like a vast improvement, not just in terms of features but in terms of performance. It still wasn't "snappy", but I figured I was doing heavy work so that was just how it was. Fast-forward 5 years and I've been doing JS in VSCode for a while. My current company offered to pay for Webstorm so I gave it a try. Lo and behold it was still sludgy, but now unbearable to me because I've gotten used to VSCode. The one other major Java app I've used is DBeaver, which has the same problem to an even greater degree. Luckily I don't have to use it super often.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Eclipse interestingly uses native controls which it hooks up to Java, while IntelliJ draws everything essentially.
mnm1 6y ago
Lighter in terms of memory? No way. Intellij is always at a few gb per instance. They are indeed laggy as hell. With the latest Mac os intellij products specifically bring down the entire os for ten to twenty minutes at a time requiring a hard reboot without which the cycle starts again. Except it's not java or intellij, it's the os. I only wish they were electron apps. That way I wouldn't have to return a $4400 brand new 16" mbpro because of its constant crashing due to horrible native apps. All apps can be shitty. At least electron ones are cross platform, work, and generally do not bring the whole system to a standstill followed by a hard crash. While using about the same resources as electron apps.
LgWoodenBadger 6y ago
If that's the case regarding IntelliJ then you probably haven't changed the jvm heap size, which is defaulted to something very small (2GB maybe) by IntelliJ.
karmakaze 6y ago
I work daily in a codebase with 20M lines and RubyMine can still search near-instantly compared to say VS Code. One thing that's still true is that there are sometimes long pauses, presumably garbage collection, or I suspect more likely bugs as changing window/input focus can sometimes snap out of it.

by _bxg1 6y ago

eyegor 6y ago

Interestingly they seem to run exactly the same on horribly low spec machines. I blame the jvm's love for boxing and unboxing everything in IL land. Of course by now I'd hope it's less wasteful - last I spent serious time in Java was 2015.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nv-vn 6y ago

I've definitely noticed the same on IntelliJ but weirdly enough Eclipse feels just fine. IIRC both are written in Java, so maybe it comes down to the design of IntelliJ moreso than the limitations of the JVM?

_bxg1 6y ago
I used Eclipse for a while before switching to IntelliJ around ~2015 and it actually seemed like a vast improvement, not just in terms of features but in terms of performance. It still wasn't "snappy", but I figured I was doing heavy work so that was just how it was. Fast-forward 5 years and I've been doing JS in VSCode for a while. My current company offered to pay for Webstorm so I gave it a try. Lo and behold it was still sludgy, but now unbearable to me because I've gotten used to VSCode. The one other major Java app I've used is DBeaver, which has the same problem to an even greater degree. Luckily I don't have to use it super often.
saagarjha 6y ago
Eclipse interestingly uses native controls which it hooks up to Java, while IntelliJ draws everything essentially.

mnm1 6y ago

Lighter in terms of memory? No way. Intellij is always at a few gb per instance. They are indeed laggy as hell. With the latest Mac os intellij products specifically bring down the entire os for ten to twenty minutes at a time requiring a hard reboot without which the cycle starts again. Except it's not java or intellij, it's the os. I only wish they were electron apps. That way I wouldn't have to return a $4400 brand new 16" mbpro because of its constant crashing due to horrible native apps. All apps can be shitty. At least electron ones are cross platform, work, and generally do not bring the whole system to a standstill followed by a hard crash. While using about the same resources as electron apps.

LgWoodenBadger 6y ago

If that's the case regarding IntelliJ then you probably haven't changed the jvm heap size, which is defaulted to something very small (2GB maybe) by IntelliJ.

karmakaze 6y ago

I work daily in a codebase with 20M lines and RubyMine can still search near-instantly compared to say VS Code. One thing that's still true is that there are sometimes long pauses, presumably garbage collection, or I suspect more likely bugs as changing window/input focus can sometimes snap out of it.