5 ms·

Yeah, they just don't get it, they have stayed for so long in the enterprise java world that they can't comprehend that everybody else moved on from those bloat

Yeah, they just don't get it, they have stayed for so long in the enterprise java world that they can't comprehend that everybody else moved on from those bloated IDEs. On my case if I had a choice even between Notepad++ and IntelliJ (to pick an extreme example), I would still use Notepad++. VScode is a very nice middle ground where the defaults make sense and you can get powerful extensions for everything else you want, there's a reason it's so popular.

rob74 6y ago
Am I the only one who finds it a little bit ironic to call IntelliJ bloated, and then recommend VS Code, which may not be that "bloated" feature-wise, but is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? A VS Code-like product using the Sublime Text engine would be the ideal development tool for me. As long as that's not available, I'm using PHPStorm at work (my company is paying for it) and VS Code for my private projects in Go - still haven't tried out Goland, IntelliJ's Go IDE, but so far I'm happy with VS Code.
- realusername 6y ago
  I'm well aware that VSCode as a tech product is also full of bloat internally, the difference is that this bloat is mostly hidden to the user. What they have going for them is that it's a well designed text editor with sensible defaults in the first place, it "just works" and it's simple, that's also why it's so popular. You can add as much (or as little) as you want on top of it.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    The UI is also a lot cleaner. There are only a couple of icons and each of them does something I use regularly. Jetbrains products have 300 icons and I use about 5 of them. Once I worked out I could do everything I use rubymine for in vscode with plugins I stopped paying that license fee.
- jdmichal 6y ago
  > VS Code ... is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? You say that, but IntelliJ is not exactly slouching on resource usage. I see far lower memory usage in VS Code than I do IntelliJ opening the same projects.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  No, there is no irony there. HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. I don't know what Electron does under similar circumstances because I've never tried to measure it, but I know that I regularly see Electron apps using less than 70MB, so we can estimate an upper bound on Electron's typical contribution to bloat as being no more than ~30% of Java's. For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB. I doubt that much of that difference is actually attributable to using a browser rendering engine for GUI layout. In fact, I'm guessing that Chromium's net impact on the situation falls below the noise threshold of this comparison. So, yeah, not worried about it. FWIW, vscode also started up quite a bit faster, and I experience less keyboard lag when using it. And, if we're looking for mature and full-featred cross-platform GUI toolkits, that's about it for your options. Yes, there's QT, but, with a sticker price of $4000/developer/year, it's hard to criticize people for not choosing it. And there's GTK+, which is fine, I suppose, but not exactly everyone's cup of tea. Long story short: This Electron-flaming meme is getting old. If you don't like JavaScript, just come out and say it. If you don't like how Chromium is eating the world, that's a fair point, too. But stop scapegoating Electron for things like how Slack's desktop app used to leak memory at an astonishing rate. That was always the app developer's fault, not Electron's.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    QT is free if you’re OK linking it as LGPL.
  - vips7L 6y ago
    > HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. This is much lower in newer jdk's [0]. > For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB I believe this to just be intellij bloat and not JVM because it just does too much. I run VSCode with the Java plugins and ZGC (read: eclipse language server, which is all jvm) and the language server only ends up using around 250mb of ram. [0] https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.html https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.ht...
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  > but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is something you want to do in a text-editor is it not? Why not use the best tool for the job? You're probably right that something like Sublime Text is faster - but that's a massive undertaking that would take a lot of engineering to get right.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    The job of a browser is to render a wide range of UI specifications reliably and support a collection of broken but grandfathered web languages, not to render them quickly. Speed is nice, but it comes after those concerns. The point of Electron is to allow people to develop UIs quickly, leveraging their experience with the web. Electron is extremely bloated & slow. To some degree it has to be. If browsers were about speed, they wouldn't interpret Javascript. I'd argue they'd probably force the UI to be specified in a form that explicitly disallows inefficiencies and probably isn't turing complete. I'd argue a domain-specific solution for rendering highlighted code specifically could be a lot faster than a browser, like multiple orders of magnitude. We know that's the case by virtue of the fact we could even do it at all in the 80s.
nullsense 6y ago
How on earth would you navigate any reasonably sized Java or .NET project in Notepad++? That would be so far beyond impractical you wouldn't last an afternoon.

rob74 6y ago

Am I the only one who finds it a little bit ironic to call IntelliJ bloated, and then recommend VS Code, which may not be that "bloated" feature-wise, but is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? A VS Code-like product using the Sublime Text engine would be the ideal development tool for me. As long as that's not available, I'm using PHPStorm at work (my company is paying for it) and VS Code for my private projects in Go - still haven't tried out Goland, IntelliJ's Go IDE, but so far I'm happy with VS Code.

realusername 6y ago
I'm well aware that VSCode as a tech product is also full of bloat internally, the difference is that this bloat is mostly hidden to the user. What they have going for them is that it's a well designed text editor with sensible defaults in the first place, it "just works" and it's simple, that's also why it's so popular. You can add as much (or as little) as you want on top of it.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  The UI is also a lot cleaner. There are only a couple of icons and each of them does something I use regularly. Jetbrains products have 300 icons and I use about 5 of them. Once I worked out I could do everything I use rubymine for in vscode with plugins I stopped paying that license fee.
jdmichal 6y ago
> VS Code ... is based on a browser engine, so also not really light on resources? You say that, but IntelliJ is not exactly slouching on resource usage. I see far lower memory usage in VS Code than I do IntelliJ opening the same projects.
mumblemumble 6y ago
No, there is no irony there. HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. I don't know what Electron does under similar circumstances because I've never tried to measure it, but I know that I regularly see Electron apps using less than 70MB, so we can estimate an upper bound on Electron's typical contribution to bloat as being no more than ~30% of Java's. For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB. I doubt that much of that difference is actually attributable to using a browser rendering engine for GUI layout. In fact, I'm guessing that Chromium's net impact on the situation falls below the noise threshold of this comparison. So, yeah, not worried about it. FWIW, vscode also started up quite a bit faster, and I experience less keyboard lag when using it. And, if we're looking for mature and full-featred cross-platform GUI toolkits, that's about it for your options. Yes, there's QT, but, with a sticker price of $4000/developer/year, it's hard to criticize people for not choosing it. And there's GTK+, which is fine, I suppose, but not exactly everyone's cup of tea. Long story short: This Electron-flaming meme is getting old. If you don't like JavaScript, just come out and say it. If you don't like how Chromium is eating the world, that's a fair point, too. But stop scapegoating Electron for things like how Slack's desktop app used to leak memory at an astonishing rate. That was always the app developer's fault, not Electron's.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  QT is free if you’re OK linking it as LGPL.
- vips7L 6y ago
  > HotSpot, under a typical configuration, eats up about 250MB just sitting there doing nothing. This is much lower in newer jdk's [0]. > For a slightly more apples-to-apples comparison that's also quite a bit more apples-to-jicama, if I open vscode and IDEA on the same project (a small one I'm just getting started on), vscode and all its helpers are using 316MB, and IDEA is using 1.08GB I believe this to just be intellij bloat and not JVM because it just does too much. I run VSCode with the Java plugins and ZGC (read: eclipse language server, which is all jvm) and the language server only ends up using around 250mb of ram. [0] https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.html https://cl4es.github.io/2019/11/20/OpenJDK-Startup-Update.ht...
CodeGlitch 6y ago
> but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is something you want to do in a text-editor is it not? Why not use the best tool for the job? You're probably right that something like Sublime Text is faster - but that's a massive undertaking that would take a lot of engineering to get right.
- bananaface 6y ago
  The job of a browser is to render a wide range of UI specifications reliably and support a collection of broken but grandfathered web languages, not to render them quickly. Speed is nice, but it comes after those concerns. The point of Electron is to allow people to develop UIs quickly, leveraging their experience with the web. Electron is extremely bloated & slow. To some degree it has to be. If browsers were about speed, they wouldn't interpret Javascript. I'd argue they'd probably force the UI to be specified in a form that explicitly disallows inefficiencies and probably isn't turing complete. I'd argue a domain-specific solution for rendering highlighted code specifically could be a lot faster than a browser, like multiple orders of magnitude. We know that's the case by virtue of the fact we could even do it at all in the 80s.

nullsense 6y ago

How on earth would you navigate any reasonably sized Java or .NET project in Notepad++? That would be so far beyond impractical you wouldn't last an afternoon.