3 ms·

> Honestly, Jetbrains tout their flagship product - IntelliJ - as this top-of-the-range Java/Kotlin IDE yet they can't ship a stable product to save their lives

by fivea 5y ago

> Honestly, Jetbrains tout their flagship product - IntelliJ - as this top-of-the-range Java/Kotlin IDE yet they can't ship a stable product to save their lives. I use IntelliJ and Clion daily and I have never noticed any sort of instability. I used to experience long indexing times until I learned that I chronically misconfigured projects and included build and autogenerated dirs in the index, which is trivially solved by excluding them and invalidating the cache. We're talking about something you do once right after you import the project. The only foobared filesystem issue I ever stumbled upon was when I toyed with junctions pointing to a RAM drive on Windows, and Clion left the junctions out of the project view. And that was it. Could you please elaborate and point out real world examples that showcase any instability you implied?

GordonS 5y ago
Similar story for me, except it's Rider I use daily - it's been absolutely rock solid for me (way more than Visual Studio, that's for sure), for all the years I've used it. I've been seriously impressed with the JetBrains team for always releasing such solidity, despite it being such a complex product. There can be some errors if I try an EAP version, but that's expected of course.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  I remember when rider first came out, it was such a breath of fresh air performance wise compared to visual studio. Haven't done any c# in a while now so unsure if that's still the case but make heavy use of all the other tools and happily pay my yearly subscription. There's occasional glitches, recently datagrip (the database ide) has sometimes got itself into odd states where it's loading the data sources infinitely, but overall I find them stable and performant products
thejosh 5y ago
Same. I had issues back in the day with HDD speeds, but since going to SSDs over 6?+ years ago and now NVME it flies. I use IntelliJ, Clion, Datagrip and sometimes Rubymine if I need to touch Ruby code and it's pretty good.
- zerocount 5y ago
  NVME might be the greatest advancement ever in terms of noticable speed improvement. SSD was alright, but I wasn't blown away by it.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    Don't worry, the new performance budget will be eaten soon enough.
ajkjk 5y ago
> Could you please elaborate and point out real world examples that showcase any instability you implied? It's hard translate anecdotes into evidence for things like this without dedicating a bunch of time to it -- either to tracking down bugs or other users, or carefully making sure that you have eliminated any project-specific problems or misconfigurations. So I agree with the parent that Intellij products seem to be quite glitchy and to have chronically bad performance, but I haven't put the time in to fully understand why so I doubt I could convince you.
- fivea 5y ago
  > It's hard translate anecdotes into evidence for things like this without dedicating a bunch of time to it This is how any credibility breaks down. Posting a bug report takes as much time as posting a message on HN. Moreover, if these problems were so eggregious and so frequent as claimed, wouldn't you be more motivated to post something about them in order to get them fixed? I mean, most of jetbrains' product line is only available to paying customers. But alas no example is given. Not even a faint description of what the problem felt like. Just a blanket accusation that the world-leading IDE company is unable to ship a stable IDE.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I've been using JetBrains' products for about a decade (IDEA / Rider / CLion) and have run into my fair share of annoying bugs. A search inquiry into the the vast majority of them (by error messages or vague descriptions of the problem) usually finds an item in their bugtracker that's been sitting there from many months to many years without any obvious signs of activity (despite ACKs from the developers and multiple me-toos from the users). I still prefer JetBrains' IDEs, but they are extremely glitchy. It's just a fact of life if you've spent any significant amount of time in them. They seem to just not care about performance and bugs the same way they care about churning out new features.
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    Well this is an HN comment section not a serious attempt at solving the problem. I have no reason to try to convince you, nor the inclination to produce a satisfying argument. But perhaps you should be less dismissive of people claiming things on here if for no other reason that it's kinda toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, maybe the number of posters who are complaining about Jetbrains products on here is evidence to you that our issues are not, in fact, imagined. Also, as the other commenter said, there are always open issues when I go look for the things that I'm experiencing. That doesn't chain the experience on my side.
Aeolun 5y ago
Switching a git branch is also a great way to kick off reindexing. When working with typescript, it’ll still index your packages even if you’ve excluded it because it needs it for autocompletion (I assume).

by fivea 5y ago

GordonS 5y ago

Similar story for me, except it's Rider I use daily - it's been absolutely rock solid for me (way more than Visual Studio, that's for sure), for all the years I've used it. I've been seriously impressed with the JetBrains team for always releasing such solidity, despite it being such a complex product. There can be some errors if I try an EAP version, but that's expected of course.

mnahkies 5y ago
I remember when rider first came out, it was such a breath of fresh air performance wise compared to visual studio. Haven't done any c# in a while now so unsure if that's still the case but make heavy use of all the other tools and happily pay my yearly subscription. There's occasional glitches, recently datagrip (the database ide) has sometimes got itself into odd states where it's loading the data sources infinitely, but overall I find them stable and performant products

thejosh 5y ago

Same. I had issues back in the day with HDD speeds, but since going to SSDs over 6?+ years ago and now NVME it flies. I use IntelliJ, Clion, Datagrip and sometimes Rubymine if I need to touch Ruby code and it's pretty good.

zerocount 5y ago
NVME might be the greatest advancement ever in terms of noticable speed improvement. SSD was alright, but I wasn't blown away by it.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Don't worry, the new performance budget will be eaten soon enough.

ajkjk 5y ago

> Could you please elaborate and point out real world examples that showcase any instability you implied? It's hard translate anecdotes into evidence for things like this without dedicating a bunch of time to it -- either to tracking down bugs or other users, or carefully making sure that you have eliminated any project-specific problems or misconfigurations. So I agree with the parent that Intellij products seem to be quite glitchy and to have chronically bad performance, but I haven't put the time in to fully understand why so I doubt I could convince you.

fivea 5y ago
> It's hard translate anecdotes into evidence for things like this without dedicating a bunch of time to it This is how any credibility breaks down. Posting a bug report takes as much time as posting a message on HN. Moreover, if these problems were so eggregious and so frequent as claimed, wouldn't you be more motivated to post something about them in order to get them fixed? I mean, most of jetbrains' product line is only available to paying customers. But alas no example is given. Not even a faint description of what the problem felt like. Just a blanket accusation that the world-leading IDE company is unable to ship a stable IDE.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I've been using JetBrains' products for about a decade (IDEA / Rider / CLion) and have run into my fair share of annoying bugs. A search inquiry into the the vast majority of them (by error messages or vague descriptions of the problem) usually finds an item in their bugtracker that's been sitting there from many months to many years without any obvious signs of activity (despite ACKs from the developers and multiple me-toos from the users). I still prefer JetBrains' IDEs, but they are extremely glitchy. It's just a fact of life if you've spent any significant amount of time in them. They seem to just not care about performance and bugs the same way they care about churning out new features.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  Well this is an HN comment section not a serious attempt at solving the problem. I have no reason to try to convince you, nor the inclination to produce a satisfying argument. But perhaps you should be less dismissive of people claiming things on here if for no other reason that it's kinda toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, maybe the number of posters who are complaining about Jetbrains products on here is evidence to you that our issues are not, in fact, imagined. Also, as the other commenter said, there are always open issues when I go look for the things that I'm experiencing. That doesn't chain the experience on my side.

Aeolun 5y ago

Switching a git branch is also a great way to kick off reindexing. When working with typescript, it’ll still index your packages even if you’ve excluded it because it needs it for autocompletion (I assume).