I get a horrible feeling in my stomach when I see these "remote" IDE options. I am very sure that they have their benefits, coding from a thin-client machine and having an "always on" session in the cloud ...
But it feels like a slow errosion of our control and ownership of our tools. Where everything is becoming a rent-seeking opportunity and good tools are made available for a monthly rent.
Personally I like having my whole build system, IDE, CI/CD on a machine I work at. I get this might not be for everyone, but I think we need to be careful what we give up long-term for these conveniences.
Granted, I could just use VI and a terminal and nobody is forcing anyone to use anything ... but like many things, they are not like-choices.
I depend on my tools, and the fewer dependencies to paid-montly SaaS features the better.
JetBrains makes money selling to corporate engineering orgs. In that context the incentives towards remote development environments are very strong. You can get a developer immediately productive (again) by restoring a golden image. Instead of paying engineers to optimize the build or write IDE plugins to index manageable subsets of the codebase, you can just throw power at it. Remote dev environments at my company have 96 cores. The monorepo builds in about a tenth of the time. Unfortunately I think it’s inevitable.
The only thing slowing it down was developer rejection of the austerity of vim and emacs. That’s changing now with VSCode’s in-browser and SSH Remote support. That’s the golden path now at my work. Although we still pay for JetBrains licenses, the JetBrains workflow is quietly and unofficially deprecated.
They have to do this to stay relevant. And I’m glad they’re doing it, because I want my JetBrains-level capabilities back. VSCode doesn’t come particularly close.
Especially in corporate context this will be the future for compliance reasons. No more developers who accidentally have code on their machine and lose it. Less access tokens on the client machines etc.
Will be an interesting trend of going back to the mainframe ... and will be interesting to see how that will collide with developers who want to have control and chose their tools and setup.
As another data point, I buy a license to all Jetbrains IDEs as a private individual. The non-remoteness and the fact my license is for a perpetual installed version matters to my livelihood. It's also a known cost where many things get more PAYG
Personally I love seeing this option because it lets me run my dev environment in a local VM. Sadly, I no longer trust community-developed editor plug-ins or dev tools to be free from malicious code. We talk about the problems with npm dependencies all the time on HN. How often do you audit the dependencies of your favorite VSCode plugins? I simply don’t want that code running on my system with full user access, and this architecture lets me avoid that. Of course there are still risks with it having access to dev code, but reducing potential exposure is a good thing.
No wonder developers complain about sluggishness and running out of memory when they're literally using a headless web browser to write code. Sublime Text works brilliantly. I can have tens of projects, hundreds of files open and the memory usage is peanuts. I don't get the hype about "modern" IDEs let alone remote IDEs.
I'm sure you already know this, but I used to use sublime text and moved to an IDE because of the debugging features. Sublime text and a terminal is great for simple problems, but you'll cost yourself a lot of time doing print statements when you could just use an IDE.
Sublime Text is handy for doing text manipulation and jumping around files. I use it in addition to Xcode for that sort of thing. I know some vim but not enough to use it this way. I hope Fleet is closer to ST in speed than I’ve heard VSCode is sometimes.
I always used ST even after trying VS Code and Atom some years ago, but some weeks ago installed VS Code to try GitHub Copilot and I haven't already gone back.
The integration of VS Code with my C tools are so good that I don't see myself going back.
I can totally understand the feeling, but I read this as just as much an opportunity for the other way around.
However this may now make it possible for a person who can't afford the hardware to make his own projects by renting the actual hardware a little at a time, as he has needs for it.
Gitlab codespaces works even if all you have is a locked down school issued Chromebook.
And it is not as if you don't have plenty of options if you want to run the entire thing on your own machine(s).
Agreed, if you subscribe to there being such a thing for “software craftsmanship” then you might also expect to have some reverence for the tools being used.
I like the term rent-seeking. I think conscious devs should be against this.
But this is here just about the software architecture design. This is kind of similar to the X Server and Client architecture. Or to games like Quake 3.
The server and client is by design separated, which potentially allows to run the server on some other host, and remotely connect to it.
But you can host your own server. And you can also just run it locally, and locally connect to it. You can even bundle it together.
I don't see how this is bad. Only if the server part would not be available to you, then yes, sure, this is bad. But otherwise, this is a very nice and flexible design.
That WOULD be great, IF they open sourced the server side. Otherwise, it's just one bad day away from some manager pulling the old switcheroo, and making the server a paid "pro" thing.
They won't open source it but I imagine they will allow you to run a version of it inside your corporate firewall, at a premium price, just like their 'Code With Me' server.
While I don't doubt the goal is cloud, it's not the only use.
As a student, I have a desktop at one of my parents' house that I can control over ssh, this kind of features make remote development much easier and is often needed when I run an intensive task for hours. The experience with VSCode over ssh is really great. Some have pointed out local VMs, which is another use for this.
I know you are mainly commenting on "cloud remote" things, but I do want to mention that I find VSCode's "remote ssh" mode very useful, and I use it frequently when I'm sitting at my windows desktop and I want to edit code on the headless linux machine in my basement.
So in general I am positive on IDEs that allow some type remote editing experience.
> I get a horrible feeling in my stomach when I see these "remote" IDE options.
Same here. For me, it is the understanding that every bit of this 'convenience' is adding overhead and latency to what should ultimately just be a text editor with some degree of real-time feedback. I can barely tolerate RDP on a local LAN setup for writing code. Across the internet is a joke, especially if some corporate VPN is in the middle.
Remote tools are totally acceptable when a human isn't in the loop on every frame update. The laws of physics are never going to give us a win-win here. If you want remote tooling + cake (i.e., a low-latency UI experience that doesn't live local), you will need to start deploying this stuff closer to the users' physical locations.
But here I have to ask what your experience with such remote setups is? I used the remote features of Visual Studio Code a while back because I needed a beefy machine that was integrated into a specific remote service landscape. I have to say I couldn't really notice that it was running remotely. But that probably depends on your company and how weird their network setup is.
You mentioned RDP which I wouldn't even start comparing to a setup like this. Obviously streaming individual frames, video and the likes over the network is a different beast than having an editor running on a remote machine and only stream commands and keystrokes. For example my ssh sessions don't usually involve a lot of lag and work just fine.
> I have to say I couldn't really notice that it was running remotely.
Perhaps this is like how some people swear on their life they cant see the difference between a 60hz and 120hz display. I know individuals who absolutely love all the touch screen controls and fly-by-wire features in their cars.
There is definitely some subjectivity to this. Especially, if the notion of building remote workspaces is cool to you. This would make the little annoyances much easier to ignore.
Some of us are sent right off the deep end by the most trivial of matters. I find myself in this camp. If I consciously detect the network round trip, I am going to immediately fall out of flow and start fucking with settings and checking network conditions. This is a huge liability for me when I already struggle to find focus to write code during the day.
I think it's the classic efficiency tradeoff. Centralizing these tools is more efficient for the vendor, for the IT department, for users. It streamlines a bunch of things.
But the tradeoff is increased risk: a single point of failure, a reduction in agency, etc.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this question; it depends on the individual case (not just the product, but the customer)
The track record with these centralisation trends is that standalone tools get less and less features and attention then die out, leaving little choice.
I'd hate to see the existing IDEs like pycharm die
Remote IDEs aren't necessarily about subscription based SaaS. For me any editor that can't be run by ssh into a workstation within the build-farm is a non-starter.
On the subject of Apple making macOS a closed ecosystem, ala iOS, I have commented that they can't. They have to keep macOS a general purpose OS in order to write iOS apps. Someone else responded that they could move all iOS development to tools running in the clown, and this prospect makes me very nervous. I, too, like everything running locally, and have no desire for ANY of these remote tool ideas. It "solves" problems -- which I perceive -- relatively few of us have, but which companies would LOVE to corner the market on, and lock people into yet another walled garden.
This was almost overdue. Since the beginning of Covid, the need for good remote code development raised quite a bit (at least for many people I know, including our team). When compared to VS Code and its remote editing over SSH, IntelliJ was really lacking. I know of a couple of people who went away from PyCharm just because of this.
I tried Code With Me but this seems limited to 10 minutes in the free version or so, and also not really intended for remote editing but more for pair programming.
> hosted in Space
What does this mean? I have not really explored this so far. Can I host private own Space instances? I can imagine this would be a requirement in many environments.
Is Space an alternative to GitHub or other hosting solutions? We would not want to move our code, issues and internal project management over to some other platform. We just want good remote editing support.
Will there be a free community version of Fleet?
Anyway, I applied for an invitation to Fleet Preview. Maybe I can get a chance soon to try it out.
> When compared to VS Code and its remote editing over SSH, IntelliJ was really lacking. I know of a couple of people who went away from PyCharm just because of this.
What issues did they have?
PyCharm in particular has had a "remote interpreter" feature for a while which works quite well. The text is edited locally but the interpreter and libraries are installed on the remote end. It then brings back whatever it needs for code analysis, so performance when editing is the same as local dev.
The story isn't so great for other languages, though.
The ability to run extensions remotely is really nice. Sometimes I like to develop in my personal environment and running extensions remotely keeps my extensions' NPM dependencies sandboxed from my personal environment.
I have used both for this purpose. The setup in pycharm/intellij is about 100x more work so if you don’t plan on working alot on a particular project, in remote mode, it’s just too convenient to use vscode. It parses your .ssh/config so there’s no manual setup, or at least close to 0. In intellij you have to set up folder sync, remote interpreters, , +++. It works great but it’s just a huge hassle in comparison.
It's a very complex environment, where the Python code is widely spread, and also lots of other configuration files are involved. It's not realistic or possible to have a local copy of all of it in our case.
Meanwhile IntelliJ is rotting with months-old bugs that render entire features useless, with no fixes and no ETAs in sight. The only product that I pay money for that constantly, on almost every release, pains me with new bugs, a good portion of which are never fixed. I thought about using other Jetbrains products like DataGrip (and now this Fleet), but I'm not going to invest even more into a company that simply refuses to fix bugs and regressions.
IntelliJ IDEA along with the platform is the largest team at JetBrains and we're constantly working on bugs and features. If you can please point me to the issues you're referring to in YouTrack, I can check the status.
- Regression: Markdown preview vertical sync does not work anymore
- Makes editing long documentation files a pain, I have to use an external markdown editor now
- First reported 12 months ago
- Regression: Git actions don't work anymore when looking at the file diff window
- Breaks my reviewing workflow, I have to use an older version of IntelliJ (which of course has its own problems)
- First reported 3 months ago
Missing / incomplete features is one thing (hello Scala 3 support), but leaving regressions unfixed for so long is breaking the fundamental trust that users have in your product – the ability to rely on the basic functionality that already exists.
This bug is quite telling: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-276949 It is marked as fixed but it is not yet released. If you look inside, you will see that HTTP Proxy authentication has been broken for almost a year. Many corporate users are behind such proxies, and they suffer.
This kind of bugs should be utmost priority, because they directly impact the cashflow.
I think that it would be good to dedicate a few months with no new feature and just focus on fixing all the regression bugs, there's a lot of bugs that are reported for many months to a year seemingly without activity.
I used to like Intellij but got fed up and just stopped using it. Dealing with regression bugs isn't worth it. An IDE should be extremely stable, releasing new features is great but it shouldn't be to the detriment of existing features.
That might indicate a good place to work for a software engineer, but not necessarily a profitable business. If a bug affects 1% of your customers but a feature will potentially bring 2% more customers, the business will obviously prioritise the latter.
Disclaimer: I know that the above is an oversimplification but the point is there has to be a balance between fixing bugs and adding features. You can't wait until all reported bugs have been fixed.
I think that's often the reasoning behind this but I think the oversimplification doesn't help. It's usually harder to attract new customers than to retain them so retention is important and regression bugs affect that. They slowly erode the confidence until the customers who were your major advocates now become strong critics wherever they go.
oh yes, I didn't mean to harp on you, what I meant is that I believe a lot of executives make the same calculation, oversimplifying things in the same way which leads to the repeated QA issues both Apple and Microsoft have or to the issues that Jetbrains has. New features are exciting and are seen as ways to get new customers.
Stability and bug fixes is not sexy and I believe underestimated as a way to retain customers but it's critical to customer happiness.
> A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.
Over the weekend I spent a good chunk of a day fighting with a copy of Windows 11 for ARM preview that has a major bug wherein the Start Menu just straight-up doesn’t work. I’m not sure Microsoft is running at 12 full-time 21 years on from when this article was posted.
More effective would be to send the board and the CEO links to this and the other thread to show how long-gone the days of "develop with pleasure!" really are.
People on this issue[1] have been asking themselves the same questions.
New very specific features are added with every new releases. However, the Git/shelf experience is lacking the ability to commit specific lines.
This is pretty unrelated, but it's bugged me for years and this is the first chance I've had to ask someone who works at Jetbrains, so I'm going to ask anyway: what exactly is going on with the name "IntelliJ IDEA" versus the other IDEs (Pycharm, RubyMine, etc.)? When I first saw it, I assumed that either "IDEA" was a brand of IDEs of which IntelliJ was one, or the reverse, but I was surprised when I saw that the other IDEs from Jetbrains don't use either word for their names. Is there any other IDEA other than IntelliJ? Is anything else "IntelliJ" besides "IDEA"? The best explanation I can come up with is that there was originally an idea (pun intended) to reuse branding across them, but it was abandoned by the time the other IDEs came out, but I have no idea if this even fits the timeline of their releases, let alone if it's accurate.
It’s funny because I use Rider for work and I did have few issues that I reported but my experience is totally different. I got instant help in every case, usually developer jumping into the thread and people actually fixing bugs.
Sorry for hijacking this question but I thought this might be a chance to push a bit the attention to some of the bugs I reported, as it would be nice to have them fixed.
I don't want to sound too negative here though. In general, I'm very happy with IntelliJ, and I think it's currently the best available IDE for many languages (I care mostly about Python and PyCharm currently).
There's been a long-standing issue in Rider and also Webstorm where you try to search globally with Ctrl-Shift-F, and the search UI comes up with the searchbar unfocused and pre-filled with something random. You type what you avtually want to search for, and it either goes nowhere, or tacks onto the end of whatever garbage was pre-populated in the search bar.
This sounds like this one: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-201301 It's a third-party issue that we, unfortunately, can't properly address on our side but there's a workaround available.
Not OP and quite satisfied with your products, but I want to take this opportunity to point at this issue for which I really would like to see some progress:
I was reporting a lot of bugs to them initially, but so many of them were ignored that I can’t force myself to do this anymore.
I’m still paying for IDEA Ultimate, but it's only because I’m waiting for a better IDE with a more fair subscription system (when I cancel the subscription that was at least 1 year long, I should have the LATEST version I’ve paid for, not the first one). I will try Feet, of course, but I have no high hopes nor trust for JB.
I have a subscription to ultimate. Its terms seem quite fair to me - you're effectively buying a specific version (the one you get to keep) and paying for it in instalments over the year. Until your new subscription starts you have not paid for those interim releases. They send conspicuous renewal email notices well ahead of making renewal charges which is more than most recurring subscriptions of all types provide.
So personally I'm willing to extend some trust to IntelliJ.
As a product it's quite pleasant to use. For Java development it strangely lacks quite a few of the nicer features of Eclipse, but its good quality support for so many different languages (e.g. for Rust) compensates for that.
The only language I ever really use IntelliJ for is PHP, and apart from minor issues that usually get fixed within one or two updates it's fantastic. Maybe I got lucky here, or maybe it's because every other IDE for PHP is next to useless, so it's easy for IntelliJ to shine.
I feel the same about Resharper. I stopped using it after many years simply because I could no longer bear the typing latency that is causes. I even bought a new laptop thinking the old hardware was to blame, only to discover the latency has barely improved. I'm now happy with "bare" Visual Studio 2022 - it may have fewer niceties, but I'm so much more productive!
Same for me. I tried "escaping" ReSharper a few times over the years (have used it for 10+ years) - but I kept crawling back after a few days or weeks feeling super handicapped without the features.
I also bought new hardware - and noticed no real improvement (something about a fundamental threading problem, I think).
About 6 months ago I was finally fed up and just accepted I would be slower and less productive in some areas for a while without ReSharper, but that it would be OK.
I still miss features from it on a daily basis, but overall I am now quite happy with vanilla VS2019/22 - and never want to go back to the lag-hell that is ReSharper.
The last feature that made me reinstall ReSharper was smart completion. Although by now IntelliCode seems to be often on par with it (plus some extras like automatically recognizing manual refactorings and offering them as actual refactorings).
As for refactorings and analyses: Roslynator is quite nice, but requires some tweaking which rules you really want enabled because it will otherwise cause lag as well.
It's worrying because they're a private company, and part of me thinks this isn't only to capture a new segment of the market, but also a hedge for if/when their IntelliJ users start migrating to these cloud IDEs
I am not sure how I feel about this. JetBrains either get things very right or very wrong. At this point I feel like there a pattern: Their desktop applications(IDEs) are usually great. However, my experience with their server-side solutions(teamcity, upsource) has been nothing short of explosive diarrhea. With the "remote" word tossed in there, I'm not entirely optimistic.
It's as remote as VS Code is, meaning you can run it entirely locally or as a thin client to a server that's hosted in a VM, docker container, WSL, or a remote server.
If they integrated completely vertical (their own cloud, k8s and remote machines) that would be so nice. Almost what Salesforce did for years if not decades, but less sucky!
CI/CD's must be stupid simple to work with and that's their entire purpose: you should not waste time with clicking and scrolling and dealing with custom setups. Even Jenkins, which is dog shit and I've had to use in the past was light years ahead. Have a look at gitlab, github, circleci and all the big players in the field - the exact same task takes considerably less time, documentation is perfect, whatever you want to achieve is no more than 5 lines of YAML away, the UI isn't something from a 2 year old's sketchbook, the outputs are actually clever enough to work out when and where a test for instance failed and take you directly to the relevant section of the log rather than having to click "show more" and scroll up 20 times. The email notifications it sends are practically useless - they are basically images of the static noise coming from the big bang, except they clutter your inbox. And to think the company was paying close to 3000€ per year for this crap genuinely baffles me when you have an endless amount of free and open source alternatives that actually work.
It sounds like you're talking about quite old versions, and in particular, demand something cloud hosted (not dealing with "custom setups"?).
You can script it with Kotlin these days, there is a hosted cloud version, they've redesigned the entire UI (though the old version did not look like a two year old's sketchbook), it understands test output just fine and can zap you to the right place in the log (and that's always worked for me, maybe it doesn't understand your test framework output or something).
But eh, different strokes for different folks. I hate YAML and much prefer having a GUI to help me set things up.
It still runs on your machine. But the architecture it's built on means that it can run anywhere. A similar architecture to VS Code where you can deploy the VS Code server in a docker container or a remote server and run the UI on your PC. You can still run the entire thing on your PC if you wish.
So long as they never remove the ability to run locally (they would be insane to ever do that), then I welcome this modular architecture that embraces standards like LSP.
Yes, but if they ever removed the ability to run locally altogether then they would be insane. Because there's plenty of people that do development on their local machine.
The new JetBrains products seem targetted at VSCode and specifically its remote code offerings.
I've liked JetBrains and I'm paying their license but the current $249.00 yearly fee is still too high and I fall back to VSCode frequently.
The $249.00 fee covers all of their IDEs but I don't need the .NET IDE's if I'm working on JVM languages or CLion or GoLand for instance. I was hoping for something like "Pick 2-3" IDEs for a certain fee, like say $129 for Scala, DataGrip & PyCharm, oriented towards common clusters of vertical stacks devs normally use.
I understand that $249 may not be a large amount for many folks here, but JetBrains isn't the only development tool I'm buying and supporting with a yearly license.
FWIW if you're buying it with your own money, the individual subscriptions are much cheaper. They start at $150 or so for Ultimate, I think, and less than that for individual products. Then they get cheaper every year after that (loyalty discount), and you also get an offline key to use with the last version you subbed to even after your sub ends. All in all it's a very fair pricing model.
After 3 or 4 years, my annual resub for Phpstorm was like $60/yr. Upgrading to ultimate was like $30 more. Well worth the price.
I've tried vscode several times, once every few years. It's getting closer for sure but for now still requires a bunch of extensions and tweaking to approximate the feature set of IntelliJ.
It’s funny that the person who wrote the copy for the webpage thought that “does X in seconds” was a good way to describe the speed of a modern text editor.
Can it finally do something like .vscode/settings.json so that everyone on the team doesn’t have to do manual setup steps or download a settings file from somewhere?
Opening a project should bring with it all of the conventions for working on that project, along with plugins also.
Bonus points for auto format on save and other style enforcement tools to remove pointless nit picking from the PR process and focus on the intent.
That sounds awesome. One point though - VS Code also allows you to setup a reproducable dev environment locally or through an SSH connection. It isn't clear to me based on the video if that feature is exclusive to Space or not.
And VS Code's hosted offering (VSCode.dev and GitHub Codespaces). Fleet doesn't seem to run in the browser which could offer a better UX. The remote capabilities also look to be more seamless as VS Code is still local by default and even after you connect remotely, it still mostly offers to open/browse local files (which could be considered a pro)
I use PyCharm for work and what frustrates me about JetBrains is they're constantly pursuing these greenfield projects while bugs in the IDE that are ten years old are still unresolved. I can't trust them to develop this when their other "new" features like CodeWithMe session-sharing are still very buggy and incomplete.
This nicely shows why I like my JetBrains IDEs so much: They look at what is successful and then they don't mindlessly clone the product, but they cherry-pick the core reasons why it is successful.
I have also observed that cloud coding environments (e.g. AWS Cloud9) have become more popular and I totally get why. Collaboration is easy and you can have a Linux runtime close to your production servers even though your programmers use Windows and Mac laptops. But I've always felt icky about putty my source code into some else's hands because who knows how trustworthy EC2 really is when you're working for an Amazon competitor ;) Or more generally, plenty of European companies have general rules that forbid you to put EU data onto US servers.
So I'm happy to see that JetBrains has reproduced the collaboration and Linux runtime features, while still allowing me to self-host things on a server that I fully control.
> We built Fleet to be a fast and lightweight text editor for when you need to quickly browse and edit your code. It starts up in seconds so you can begin working immediately...
An editor that takes multiple seconds to start up doesn't strike me as "fast and lightweight".
I've always seen this as a weird argument. Are people just opening and quitting their IDE/editors constantly all day?
So what if it takes 30 seconds to start if it's done once or twice a day (or once a week or less in my case). What the heck kind of environment are people working in or mindset are people in when they can't tolerate 8 seconds for their IDE to open? (And then use that as an argument why the IDE is inferior.)
There's a lot of focus on how this changes the dev environment, but there's another aspect to this change:
- You could use this to remote into a CI build that failed
- You could use this to remote into a production environment that crashed. E.g., if an unhandled exception is thrown in a server, the process pauses and waits for a debugger to attach while the API gateway switches to another server.
This could merge the concepts of CI, production, and personal dev environment so that the only difference between your dev environments and production is the scale of cloud computing required.
I'd rather they fixed the remote development in IntelliJ first. You can sort of (ab)use the remote deployment feature in Ultimate for it, but it's clearly not intended for that. And it's extremely clunky - for example the ability to exclude files from syncing is completely underpowered.
And why the hell is selecting files yet another different way of doing what's basically the same task as elsewhere? I'd suggest they should be using the File Scopes feature except it's terminally useless, with it's wierd-ass, barely documented and inadequate syntax. I've never managed to get it to work adequately.
There seems to be a common failing with JetBrains product development, they try to rush out as many different features as possible, presumably for the purposes of marketing "tick lists", but many of them are poorly designed, bug ridden and never worked on after v1.0
IntelliJ - because all the alternatives are even worse.
While they don’t specifically say what the “language server” is, if it’s the same protocol that powers VS Code[1], this is a big deal. It potentially means that language owners can build tooling that works across IDEs much more easily. Historically, JetBrains seems to have resisted the idea of a standard language protocol (which makes sense as it comes from Microsoft). My guess is it’s becoming impractical to reimplement every language feature for Typescript, C#, Go, etc. Embracing the standard LSP will mean less time spent on low level features and more time building JetBrains only value add.
At least with TypeScript, they've been using the official language server for a while. Sadly they still fall back onto their own JS-esque 'guess what this could be' mode in some situations where vanilla TS would have just emitted an error that the respective module could not be found.
For C# Rider supports Roslyn analyzers and code fixers as well, though I don't know with what performance impact (as ReSharper isn't based on Roslyn this results in all analysis work being done twice, which can be noticeable).
i don't understand how people believe LSP is perfect, it is not, the API is broken, it missing a ton of stuff and as a result client implementations are often broken
now that we have LSP running as an external process I hope they jettisoned java and are instead using C/C++/Skia or something for the editor so it's fast.
Briefly: no, it's a custom reactive UI framework similar to Jetpack Compose. Rust is used for native operations such as accessing file system, launching processes, etc
Interesting that you would use Rust for those operations since the JVM was already presumably giving you cross-platform implementations. Was that a significant performance bottleneck that got alleviated by using Rust, or was there another reason?
Whole architecture of Fleet is distributed, so we need a small binary without dependencies that could be uploaded to the dev container. All the access goes through that binary (even in local case)
It's interesting and says something about the state of tooling that, in response to those requirements, it was easier to switch to an entirely different language and ecosystem than it was to build off the existing work and convince the toolchain you were using to produce output with those properties.
Well, you can make standalone binaries with both Kotlin and Java these days, so this may be related to when Fleet was started rather than how you'd do it in 2021.
It's quite useful for pair-programming, especially remotely (but some colleagues have started doing this in the office as well, since it means that each paired programmer also has their own workplace and can look stuff up without disturbing the other), also reviews. Especially helpful for one project I was working on at the time was VS Code's ability to also share local servers with the participants (terminals as well, but never needed that so far).
Tell me one graphical application that starts up in less than 0.1 sec on desktop? Unfortunately, desktop OSs don’t employ optimizations like what exists on android and ios, which strangely manages to start programs in that timeframe.
Just started using VS Code after years of JetBrains IDEs. Wow, it's like flying through the air vs. the maple syrup feel that JB IDEs have grown to be.
Did I understand it right, that the IDE is still not web based?
Not that I am a particular fan of web based apps, however, there are very significant use cases involved like hosting a JetBrains powered editor in the web.
But it feels like a slow errosion of our control and ownership of our tools. Where everything is becoming a rent-seeking opportunity and good tools are made available for a monthly rent.
Personally I like having my whole build system, IDE, CI/CD on a machine I work at. I get this might not be for everyone, but I think we need to be careful what we give up long-term for these conveniences.
Granted, I could just use VI and a terminal and nobody is forcing anyone to use anything ... but like many things, they are not like-choices.
I depend on my tools, and the fewer dependencies to paid-montly SaaS features the better.