-- JetBrains have existed since 2000 & till recently they didn't cross my radar - what happened in the last year that I see them trending all over the Dev-o-sphere? Seems they've really hit their stride - is there a particular product folks have adopted or their marketing has improved or....? --
I don't know what tech stack you work in primarily. But IntelliJ basically ate the Java world around 12 years ago, I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user since 2010.
ReSharper has been a standard in the .NET world for well over a decade. If you're a C# developer and you don't use it, then you are at least familiar with it.
In the Python world, I believe that PyCharm has somewhere between 1/3 and 50% market share. That and VS Code are the two main games in town.
I'm not as well connected to other ecosystems, but I believe that RubyMine and PhpStorm are very prominent in the Ruby and PHP worlds.
I mean basically, in 2022 I would say that the vast majority of developers fall into one of 3 categories:
* They use a Jetbrains product.
* They use VS Code (I guess you can throw full-blown Visual Studio into this bucket as well).
* They use a plain text editor, instead of an IDE or more IDE-like tool.
It's actually surprisingly decent after you've enabled the Java extensions.
vscode is noticably faster, and has generally most of the important features at this point too, though they're sometimes hard to discover (i.e you'll need to go through the command palette for creating a new class, instead of right click -> create a new class)
I still default to intellij though but I'm paying for a private license, so i might just be biased
Jumping straight to implementations, finding all callers, immediately finding all invalid sites when you update a function, refactoring function signatures, extracting+lifting+moving methods, rewriting code into newer styles, decompiling and jumping into external libraries when debugging, understanding things like Spring config files ... the list just goes on.
Most of that works to a degree. The create class was just an example.
Fwiw: I'm not trying to convince anyone to switch over to vscode either... But it is surprisingly decent once you get used to the fact that you have to trigger basically everything through the command palette.
And some of the named features occasionally fail spectacularly with intellij too, depending on the project.
I would be shocked if Rider doesn't become the industry standard IDE for game development. My experience with Rider in UE4 and UE5 has been outstanding since I switched last year. It's a night and day difference between using Rider and using Visual Studio.
Could be. I started with Visual Studio + Resharper for .NET since ~2006. JetBrains IDEs for everything else and I am "allergic" to VSCode's UX. I can't explain it, but I just can't stomach the layout.
Personally last time I tried vscode as a basic text editor it felt kinda sluggish (not to mention lacking in features) compared to anything by jetbrains, so much so I just use intellij for even basic text editing these days.
At least give Sublime Text a credit. It should be a small market share but some people like it.
And there's probably a larger pie for those using vim/emacs. Though I seriously have problem understanding how vim can be any better than JetBrains or VS Code with vim key binding enabled.
There still are a few of us who prefer other tools.
I'm actually delighted everytime I can use NetBeans, but I am still a paying Jetbrains user because I work on projects who use Kotlin (wonderful language even if I dislike that it is only supported in IntelliJ).
That said I like Jetbrains the company even if I don't like IntelliJ and I try to help them pick up the good parts from NetBeans (Just Works, Absolutely Amazing Maven integration, Sane Defaults).
18 years of working mostly java dev, still on Eclipse. Yes its simpler. No its not for performance although on typical corporate hardware any performance gain is strongly appreciated. I prefer running command lines in ie git or maven/gradle to learn/keep using the tools even when there are plugins for pure clicking.
Even won some personal license of Idea on some Belgian java conference around 2007 (javapolis? way too long ago), but it never sticked with me for too long (back then it was significantly slower IDE but already more powerful than most peers).
A few devs within company use Idea, but there are no strict requirements. Code is easily portable between those and nothing IDE specific ever goes to git repos. It really doesn't matter that much in enterprise Java, if anybody tells you otherwise they are probably junior or do something very niche in this realm.
Yeah ReSharper has definitely been de-facto standard in .NET space since at least the C# 2.0 days. The only reasons I don't use it are that it's incredibly buggy and JetBrains' customer service is atrocious - the productivity value was tremendous.
>I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user
Ahem. We like to stay out of these wars because Eclipse is not a text editor with extensions but a full-fledged IDE. That said, I haven't looked into IntelliJ in a while - do they still reccomend switching to the eclipse compiler for performance reasons?
performance has gotten much better since IntelliJ 11 iirc. that was when I swapped over from eclipse to intelliJ, the initial startup time was still longer but performance was pretty much the same after that. Prior to that I was still using eclipse cause of how slow IntelliJ was
VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE and that's either a JetBrains product or Visual Studio (xcode for Apple).
I must be Benjamin Button then :). I feel it's the reverse: juniors need all the IDE support they can get for more context, seniors can do more with less.
I gave up on IntelliJ after failing to stop the frequent re-indexing that would make my workstation unusable, and restarting the IDE would trigger another re-index which could succeed, or hang. I hope they fixed that, but I didn't stick around to find out - and I had been paying for a license for years out of my own pocket too. VSCode just reminded me that I don't have to wait needlessly - I had become inured to slow IDEs.
This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive. Primitive IDEs and text editors may help your geek cred score, but as a long term java dev who's moved into Kotlin and go recently, vs code was borderline terrible and very limited in what I wanted in features. I never used intellij until my most recent company (eclipse mostly beforehand) but they really do a good job at streamlining the dev flow. I do miss eclipses much more dynamic layouts and arguably better integration with some external technologies, but idea's Kotlin integration has been top notch and makes for quite brisk in-the-flow coding experience like no other.
As for hitching and speed, intellij has a poor 15 seconds on my laptop before it's super snappy and basically never drops perf whatever I'm hammering at. I think the common feature rich IDE slowness strawman is a defence for what's better expressed as an opinion. If you like featureless ides, have at it.
> This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive.
Correct: and in my case, VS Code with my customizations (plugins + configs) is more than equal to the task, it does everything I'd want from a full-blown IDE, and does it in a snap. Being disrupted by your IDE is maddening because it only happens when you're in deep focus.
My IDE journey was similar to yours Eclipse -> Jetbrains, then what started off as a casual affair with VS Code on personal projects ended up being serious indeed.
I felt like it was easier to add features I want to VS Code than to remove/disable fearures from IntelliJ to trim the fat, YMMV. I'm glad to hear IntelliJ s now consistently fast after initialization - when I last used it, the slow downs were unpredictable and lasted minutes, and occasionally required restarting the IDE, but that was a long time ago, back when SSD storage was expensive.
Vscode is all dandy and fine until you try to debug something and inspect an object in memory only to find out that msft programmers hard coded the object representation as a string [Object object] cause they couldn’t be bothered to properly implement the debugger.
It's a subtle question. I'd say IntelliJ is less responsive, but I wouldn't say it's any slower. When stressed, IntelliJ's UI will get choppy and usually show a progress bar at the bottom. VSCode tends to keeps running at 60fps and stick a plain "Loading..." string somewhere in the UI.
The opposite for me, I'm one of those psychos who switched from VS to VSCode, and the majority of what I write is in C#. I decided I wanted to get extremely familiar with the dotnet CLI and how all of the tooling and build systems work, instead of relying on the conveniences provided by Visual Studio.
Debugging is fine, you can attach a debugger from VSCode no problem. For profiling, the truth is I usually don't profile lol. But if I did I would just use JetBrains' dotTrace.
Visual Studio (Full, not Code) has a Mac version now, albeit it's a totally different codebase to the Windows edition (AFAIK a much updated version of what was MonoDevelop).
> VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE
If you mean exclusive "VS Code users" then maybe.
As an IDE user for one file type (in my case *.cs ) I still find VS code a very useful tool for any other file types. I can install linters and formatters for them, e.g. for yaml, json, xml, text etc. and VS code then makes a great editor, hits a good spot between "still fairly light and fast" and "has features".
An IDE focuses on one task. VS code complements it by being a "swiss army knife"
After Crockford's "js is scheme" claim, curly emacs was bound to eventually happen. If you come to VS code from e.g. IntelliJ, the UI is surprisingly opaque, considering its undoubtedly graphic nature. Not quite C-m M-c M-butterfly opaque, but not that far from it.
IJ does have the "search everywhere" that can be used like the command palette, but it's still far from abandoning the idea of trying to make everything available in menu trees and the like. Plugins add cute pictures to the toolbar like it's 1999. VS:C is far more radical, there's The Palette and that's it.
They have three major products that are wildly popular:
- IntelliJ is the most popular IDE for JVM-based languages, and provides a framework for other IDEs (like PyCharm, GoLand, etc)
- Kotlin is the standard language for Android development, and is now a first-class citizen in Spring Boot
- Jetpack promises cross-platform UI development that works better than anything since Electron. It remains to be seen if that promise pays off, but it has people excited.
I think they lost/overgrown competition. Other IDEs started to loose development speed and newer programs like sublime, atom and vscode are not comparable (they are more like improved vim + plugins experience than heavyweight IDE).
I have switched to clion from eclipse CDT in 2018 (because of missing support for newer C++ standards) and never looked back (tried vscode but its UI is not customizable at all). Later I have subscribed for all product pack as I have projects in multiple languages (personal license is quite cheap especially with discount for long term customers).
The only think I hate about jetbrains IDEs is their licensing. It is not possible to have all features in one project:
* idea ultimate has plugins for everything except native (support is limited without debuger etc.)
* clion has plugins for native but limited plugins for everything else (pycharm community, limited JS support, no big data tools for kafka etc.)
I work on python project with some parts being C++ modules and I have to switch between IDEs for one project to have all features.
They got a lot bigger. In 2015 they had ~600 employees. By 2020 that was 1500.
Basically they were able to:
a. Refactor features out of IntelliJ Ultimate into separate products, expanding their mindshare and market share e.g. database plugin -> DataGrip.
b. Move their userbase to subscriptions -> much larger and more stable revenue stream.
c. Google migrated from Eclipse to IntelliJ for their Android IDE. Then Kotlin blew up and became adopted as the official primary language on Android, which created a massive ecosystem and drives lots of users to use IntelliJ and then upgrade to Ultimate.
CLion is a solid Choice for some C and C++ workloads, not all of them. It’s pretty good at most tasks. Struggles with super large projects and exotic compilers/build systems, but mostly solid.
Though if you’re accustomed to say visual studio, there’s few reasons to switch.
It’s nice to have a enterprise-grade IDE on Linux, though. I personally love it.
I switched to intelliJ 7 years ago after trying out Android Studio. I suppose this plus Kotlin is making people more aware of Jetbrains. Back then almost all beginner tutorials used to show Eclipse but that has changed gradually to intelliJ. In fact I can't remember seeing Eclipse in any recent programming videos, its just intelliJ and VSCode everywhere.
Around 2005 or so, I remember a programmer on another team at a bank telling me that IntelliJ was so much better than Eclipse. I've also written a lot of Ruby over the years, and at some point I was using TextMate because it was a supercharged text editor (not an IDE) that helped with some Ruby things, but eventually I switched to Rubymine which is made by JetBrains. It's not perfect, and I don't use a lot of the IDE, but considering Ruby is a dynamic language, Rubymine does a great job of helping me jump around large numbers of project files quickly to method definitions, etc. Occasionally I use it to go digging into the source of Ruby gems. Refactoring across the project works pretty well too which is harder to get right in a dynamic language. It saves me a lot of time.
I had to work on a Java-based web application for a brief-but-terrible moment, and I am very happy to have spent the money out of my own pocket for IntelliJ. I think using Java for web apps is a Bad Idea, but IntelliJ, at least, made it tolerable to write code for.
Java is great for web apps. Libraries for everything, quite fast if you keep services running (as opposed to loading them on demand) and has been quite successful in the sphere for quite some time. It's just not everyone's cup of tea. I think the more you like dynamic languages or functional the more you're going to absolutely hate java.
Java's great, but if we're building a WEB app, I like a language that can also generate the view. In Java land, everyone is now relying on some Javascript library, and I hate having to make 2 compilers agree at the edges where they touch.
I agree with that wholeheartedly, but there is a solution: there is teavm which can compile byte code to js (and wasm), or google’s closure compiler.
There used to be also GWT and nowadays Vaadin I believe to do frontend completely, but I honestly think that a shared business lib with native frontend for each platform is the best way forward.
Not sure, but they've really been active the last couple of years in language training and collaborative development. Plus, I happen to think their IDEs are probably the best out there (despite their relative complexity).
Been a happy user of their IDE suite now for many years, and IMHO, nothing else comes even close.
Same here, I didn't really notice them a lot until recently.
But then a few months ago I started learning Rust and ended up choosing CLion (with its Rust plugin), almost at the same time at the company I'm working for we started using IDEA (with its "Coldfusion" plugin). The products work, I don't have complains.
They are a Russian company with most engineers in Russia. There had been a strong records in Russian social networks of their engineers supporting Russian attacks on other countries (e.g. there was one engineer back in 2014 who moderated another forum and was banning Ukrainians and expressing glee at annexation of Crimea).
They had been working hard to distance themselves from Russia. You may also notice similar spike in activity from Yandex, who had been publishing open-source project at elevated rate last half a year.
They are a Czech company with founders originally from Russia (but most of them moved to other countries long time ago). Their leadership do not support war in Ukraine and doing many things to help Ukrainians. As for the opinions of individual engineers — there are many engineers in, say, FAANG, and other companies who sadly expressed pro-Russian views in social media. I have seen them here on Hacker News.
Yandex "parent company" is in Netherlands. Kasperky Lab "is operated" by a UK holding company.
They are one of the "sneaky" Russian companies who make money on the West but fully support Russian government. Czech office and such is to keep appearances.
1. Business/sales in Czech, eng in Saint-Petersburg. At least, used to.
2. They did not react on Ukrainians discussing their employee pro-war stance. They made sure to clean up all discussions on their forums and elsewhere.
3. They formally closed the offices. Employee are working remotely from Russia.
There already was a SolarWinds breach. There will be more.
Right. The fabled "good Russians". That do not support the "Putin war". They probably even put "support Ukraine in any means possible" on their LinkedIn profiles.
Absolutely. Also sending money and helping with logistics. If you have taken a look at the said LinkedIn profile, you might have noticed a post which says that "not supporting the Putin's war" is no longer enough. We need to do something to help Ukraine win.
I am not saying this gives an indulgence or something — I am not the one being bombed. Everything I do will probably not be enough. But it is not an excuse to do nothing.
I will not resume this discussion here. You will probably see me on your LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out if you wonder where me, my family and my friends would like you to put your money.
They are as Czech as google or apple a company from Ireland.
they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia. Their presence in Russia is huge. Working with them is a potential risk.
"they've been part of security incidents involved traces with Russia"
You mean that some company that ran a poorly secured TeamCity instance and got hacked decided to try and shift the blame to JetBrains, knowing full well that a certain demographic will eat up anything vaguely of the form "Six Degrees of Kevin Russian"?
Yeah no. Most sensible people don't consider a connection as tenuous as "some company that got hacked had misconfigured a product made by a company with offices in country X" as a reasonable thing to make insinuations on.
My sources state that they have closed all Russia's offices and terminated contracts with everyone who haven't relocated.
Update: technically, there are some corporate lawyers and accountants that are working on closing JetBrain's LLC in Russia. But we are talking about software engineers, aren't we?
