Ask HN: Is there a future for Jetbrains IDEs?
3 by Benjamin_Dobell | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I've been a Jetbrains licensee since 2012. I even develop a plugin for statically typed Lua development. Sadly, recently, the experience of being a Jetbrain's customer has gotten substantially worse. The IDEs were never light, but they're getting slower each year. The occasional several second lock-up, is not so occasional anymore. There's focus bugs, rendering issues, crashes and a never-ending stream of bugs and missing features in integrations. Compounding this, I'm yet to have an interaction with Jetbrains staff that didn't leave me tearing my hair out. A quick perusal of YouTrack makes it clear that abrupt, dismissive interactions are standard policy. That said, Jetbrains refactoring tools are unparalleled and I still recommend Jetbrains IDEs to others. It's just a much harder sell than it used to be, in no small part due to VSCode. It's not the first time JB have come up against free competition i.e. Eclipse. On-going commercial development seemed to give Jetbrains the edge. I'm not sure that's the case this time around. Microsoft standardisation efforts go a long way to facilitating VSCode adoptions e.g. Debug Adapter Protocol. Jetbrains staff, of course giving a very Jetbrains staff response when asked about DAP: > Nope, not supported and hardly will ever be. [1] Community maintained projects consistently outperform Jetbrains support. That's a large part of what makes VSCode a much more compelling threat than Eclipse ever was. Open source is much better organised now. I want Jetbrains to (continue to) succeed. I'm just not sure for how much longer they can sustain 500+ devs being pulled in every which way. The cracks are starting to show. Do others share my concerns? Are you planning on, or have you already, jumped ship to VSCode? [1] https://ift.tt/3e7cfXM