[HN Gopher] CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use
        
       Author : AlexeyBrin
       Score  : 499 points
       Date   : 2025-05-07 12:18 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.jetbrains.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.jetbrains.com)
        
       | bayindirh wrote:
       | This is good news. I for one, won't change my toolchain, but
       | having a "free for personal use" alternative is always better,
       | esp. when the license includes open source development.
       | 
       | Like it or not, C++ is not going anywhere in the short and long
       | term, so it's always good to have _real_ IDEs around (CLion,
       | Eclipse CDT, etc.) which can integrate with good instrumentation
       | and give real time feedback on your code.
        
       | 1over137 wrote:
       | Free version sends telemetry with no opt-out.
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | Yes, that one is a real bummer, actually, but if they're using
         | something like how Go does it [0], at least it's tolerable if
         | you're bound to using it.
         | 
         | [0]: https://telemetry.go.dev/privacy
        
         | enigma101 wrote:
         | just use a firewall, no?
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | There is your price right there.
        
         | ainiriand wrote:
         | Can you give us proof of that? I have not seen anything like
         | that in my RustRover usage but it might be that I have missed
         | that.
        
           | hiq wrote:
           | It's in the article:
           | 
           | > It's important to note that, if you're using a non-
           | commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of
           | anonymous usage statistics.
        
           | dardeaup wrote:
           | From the link: "It's important to note that, if you're using
           | a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the
           | collection of anonymous usage statistics."
        
         | pasoevi wrote:
         | You can still use paid version if you want to turn telemetry
         | off. With the free version, you can either use it and say
         | thanks, or not use it at all.
        
           | badsectoracula wrote:
           | Indeed, this is one of the various options one has.
           | 
           | Another option is to not use it _and_ be vocal against
           | telemetry, hopefully convincing others to do the same while
           | dissuading other developers (especially in a forum like
           | Hacker News where people that build stuff gather) from adding
           | it on their products.
        
             | pasoevi wrote:
             | I wouldn't take people seriously who are vocal against
             | telemetry in a product which has paid version with the
             | option to turn telemetry off. Such people would be vocal
             | against paying for the work others do. Also, if properly
             | anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil people make it to be.
        
               | badsectoracula wrote:
               | > I wouldn't take people seriously who are vocal against
               | telemetry in a product which has paid version with the
               | option to turn telemetry off.
               | 
               | You are conflating two separate things, a product does
               | not need telemetry to function and if telemetry is needed
               | it can be opt-in. Similarly a product does not need to be
               | free to have telemetry nor does it need to be paid to not
               | have telemetry, as i already wrote these two are
               | completely separate.
               | 
               | > Such people would be vocal against paying for the work
               | others do.
               | 
               | Again you are conflating two completely separate things:
               | people being concerned about the privacy implications of
               | telemetry (both directly and indirectly, see below) and
               | people who are against about paying others for their
               | work.
               | 
               | > Also, if properly anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil
               | people make it to be.
               | 
               | Even if anonymized (which is something you can only
               | guarantee for open source projects that either you or
               | someone you trust has checked they do such anonymization
               | properly - and also you either build yourself from the
               | source that was checked or you used a binary from a
               | reproducible build) having telemetry in place still
               | creates and reinforces a precedent of it being acceptable
               | which in turn can be used to excuse other programs doing
               | the same but those programs actually not caring about
               | doing proper anonymization (at best) or even outright
               | spying on you (at worst).
               | 
               | Besides anonymized data can still be used in conjunction
               | with other data to be deanonymized and the best way to
               | protect users from this is to not collect that data in
               | the first place.
        
               | pasoevi wrote:
               | I'm not conflating these two things. I didn't say they
               | have to have telemetry to keep it free. All I am saying
               | is, if you have the option to pay and decide whether you
               | give them telemetry or not, then there is no reason being
               | vocal about them giving you more for free. It is a
               | company and they need to make profit. If more users with
               | telemetry enabled gives them more data that they can use
               | to indirectly increase their profit, I only applaud them.
               | If they stopped allowing to turn telemetry off for the
               | product in paid version as well, then you would have a
               | valid point.
               | 
               | That said, nothing wrong with being vocal about privacy
               | and high standards in collecting usage.
        
               | throwaway51034 wrote:
               | Privacy is a fundamental human right, not something you
               | get to withhold from people until they give you money.
               | 
               | Yes, I could pay them to get a product that lets me
               | disable telemetry. I'd much rather just use something
               | else, so I don't have to fund their unethical business
               | practices.
        
               | bigstrat2003 wrote:
               | That is an extremely disingenuous framing of the topic.
               | They make a product, which you can pay money for. If you
               | prefer, they will also let you pay by sending them usage
               | telemetry. In neither case are you being deprived of a
               | human right or extorted in any way - it's a transaction
               | where you receive a benefit in exchange for something you
               | give to them.
        
             | unclad5968 wrote:
             | Genuine question. Why do you care if other people agree
             | with you about telemetry? I almost always enable telemetry
             | on anything I don't believe will serve me ads.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Democracy is the dictorship of the majority, thus when
               | majority is fine with telemetry disabling it won't be an
               | option any longer.
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | facebook were certainly slapped down for attempting "consent
           | or pay"
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay
           | 
           | "anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
        
             | KronisLV wrote:
             | Compared to most UI dark patterns and scummy tactics to get
             | you to "consent" (actually tricking you into agreeing,
             | because nobody can't be bothered to jump through like a
             | bunch of legalese and dialogs), them just giving you that
             | choice of straight up paying feels better.
             | 
             | Not really interested in their services, but at least that
             | sort of payment would let me expect less trickery in the
             | future.
             | 
             | > Critics of this consent model have called it "pay-or-
             | okay", claiming that the monthly fee is disproportional and
             | that users are not able to withdraw their consent to
             | tracking as easily as it is given, which the GDPR requires.
             | Massimiliano Gelmi, a data protection lawyer at NOYB, has
             | stated that "The law is clear, withdrawing consent must be
             | as easy as giving it in the first place. It is painfully
             | obvious that paying EUR251,88 per year to withdraw consent
             | is not as easy as clicking an 'Okay' button to accept the
             | tracking."
             | 
             | Under this model, you'd just have to refuse service to
             | everyone who doesn't pay (killing your platform) or let
             | people partake in your platform with no revenue off of them
             | (killing your platform). Neither seems reasonable from the
             | perspective of that business? Are they just supposed to
             | find other ways of monetizing their users or perish then?
        
               | ndriscoll wrote:
               | Yes, declaring that to be illegitimate is the point. Just
               | like we declare polluting rivers to be illegitimate
               | despite it being good for business.
        
             | sofixa wrote:
             | > anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
             | 
             | If it's location data, yes. If it's your IDE usage stats
             | (plugins, file types, whatever), not really.
        
               | woodson wrote:
               | Maybe it includes a list of fonts installed on your
               | system, your screen resolution, etc. You don't need much
               | to get a "fingerprint" that is anonymous but can be
               | correlated with those collected by other tools'
               | telemetry.
        
               | xp84 wrote:
               | In theory yes? But if state actors, the ones with the
               | sophistication to literally build a signature based on
               | your fonts using your IDE, and then infiltrate a second
               | application to do... whatever... if they want you that
               | bad, they're eventually just going to get you, even if
               | they have to just send someone to your house with a rusty
               | wrench to retrieve all your passwords. Those guys can get
               | the job done much more cheaply anyway.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | so we shouldn't worry about de-anonymisation because the
               | government could kick your door down?
               | 
               | seems like a weak argument
        
           | ndriscoll wrote:
           | It's nonetheless useful for people to warn others about
           | spyware. You can find the tradeoff acceptable (or be
           | willing/able to put the necessary isolation in place) while
           | thanking the other commenter for the heads up.
        
           | riquito wrote:
           | Not that people are obligated to use IntelliJ IDEs, but it's
           | sad that it boils down to "You can have privacy if you can
           | afford it". But admittedly is better to have the option to
           | use it than not being able to use it at all
        
             | atemerev wrote:
             | Their telemetry promises not to collect private data. Yes,
             | your code will probably used for training their models. But
             | so it would be if you publish it on GitHub.
        
               | ndriscoll wrote:
               | All data on my computer is private unless I specifically
               | make it public. Data thieves like to make a rhetorical
               | sleight of hand where they say they're not really
               | collecting data about you (this happens especially with
               | the topic of "differential privacy"), but that's just
               | gaslighting (i.e. trying to manipulate you into thinking
               | you simply don't _understand_ what they are doing). e.g.
               | I 'm not willing to share noisy correlations about my
               | preferences either. That information is _private_ , and
               | it _is_ information, or they wouldn 't want it.
        
               | atemerev wrote:
               | Then you are free to not use their product.
               | 
               | My privacy is indeed differential. I am willing to give
               | them the information on my coding patterns and even non-
               | commercial code for a free license, if it is not linked
               | to my identity. This is a fair exchange. I am not willing
               | to do this if they will use this information to sell me
               | ads, or sell it (unless properly anonymized) to some
               | other company. And most certainly I won't agree if they
               | collect any information beyond what's happen in the IDE.
               | 
               | Not _everything_ I do on my computer is fully private. I
               | apply much stricter standards to things that are _really_
               | private. But not everything is like this.
               | 
               | This comment is public. It will probably be used to train
               | yet another LLM. I am fine with that.
        
               | ndriscoll wrote:
               | Sure, but as I said elsewhere, it's still important that
               | people point out that past the headline ("it's free") is
               | that it is also malware (it spies on you). People were
               | free to not use BonziBuddy as well, but it was rightfully
               | characterized at the time as spyware. If the product also
               | functioned as a proxy for botnet traffic, you wouldn't
               | simply say "well you're free to not use it". You'd say
               | "beware, the 'free' version is malware". Spyware is
               | similar.
               | 
               | Posting to a public online forum is of course
               | specifically making the post public.
        
           | rustc wrote:
           | How is this not illegal under GDPR? I thought asking users to
           | pay money to not be tracked is not allowed.
        
             | wiseowise wrote:
             | It's anonymized, GDPR doesn't apply.
        
           | varispeed wrote:
           | So if you are poor, you are ripe for getting your data mined.
           | Excellent.
        
             | wiseowise wrote:
             | Food and fresh water costs money too, newsflash.
        
         | lern_too_spel wrote:
         | They're probably using the telemetry to monitor commercial
         | abuse.
        
           | anastasiak2512 wrote:
           | The telemetry is used to analyzed the most used / unused
           | features and to improve the product. For example, it's useful
           | to understand that some specific technology gains more
           | popularity among users and contribute more into its support.
        
             | lern_too_spel wrote:
             | I have no doubt that this is the primary use. It was the
             | only way to use that data until now. Now that there is a
             | free offering, there is a new potential use that neatly
             | explains why it is required in the free offering and
             | optional otherwise.
        
         | pacman1337 wrote:
         | couldn't we just block the traffic with /etc/hosts?
        
         | Someone wrote:
         | So, they're contradicting themselves, saying both
         | (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/05/clion-is-now-
         | free-f...)
         | 
         |  _"With the new non-commercial license type, you can enjoy a
         | full-featured IDE that is identical to its paid version. The
         | only difference is in the Code With Me feature - you get Code
         | With Me Community with your free license."_
         | 
         | and (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/05/clion-is-now-
         | free-f...)
         | 
         |  _"We appreciate that this might not be convenient for
         | everyone, but there is unfortunately no way to opt out of
         | sending anonymized statistics to JetBrains under the terms of
         | the Toolbox agreement for non-commercial use. The only way to
         | opt out is by switching to either a paid subscription or one of
         | the complimentary options mentioned here."_
         | 
         | Also, if _they_ find that _unfortunate_ , why did they make the
         | product do that?
        
           | codedokode wrote:
           | > there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending
           | anonymized statistics
           | 
           | There is a way - simply use an open source alternative to
           | JetBrains.
        
       | DemetriousJones wrote:
       | Awesome news
        
       | andy_ppp wrote:
       | What's the Duck Duck Go equivalent for editors these days?
       | Everything seems to be spying on me and/or offering to send my
       | code to AI in the cloud.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | VSCodium without any extensions? IMO it's the extensions that
         | are the big exfil risk, not necessarily the editor.
        
         | bartekpacia wrote:
         | CLion (and other JetBrains IDEs for that matter) doesn't send
         | any of your code to AI in the Cloud (unless you use sth like AI
         | Assistant yourself, of course)
        
           | andy_ppp wrote:
           | It does send telemetry and analytics I believe? I should have
           | been broader in the tracking I specified...
        
             | tredre3 wrote:
             | All duckduckgo software is filled with telemetry and
             | analytics that cannot be disabled (The search engine, the
             | Android web browser, the Windows web browser).
        
               | yegg wrote:
               | FWIW All DuckDuckGo telemetry is completely anonymous:
               | https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/atb
        
         | badsectoracula wrote:
         | I've been using Kate (KDE's advanced text editor) recently.
        
           | bayindirh wrote:
           | That thing is wicked fast and works really well with gopls.
        
         | rockwotj wrote:
         | neovim
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | The old standbys of Vim and Emacs.
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | Eclipse for IDE and KATE for "Code aware text editor".
        
         | lknuth wrote:
         | Helix if you like working in your terminal.
        
         | QuadmasterXLII wrote:
         | vim, with a clangd plugin for ide like navigation and error
         | hints
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Notepad++, SublimeText, vi and Emacs clones, Netbeans,
         | Eclipse,....
        
         | jszymborski wrote:
         | Eclipse is still around...
        
         | symmetricsaurus wrote:
         | Doom Emacs (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs)
        
         | deafpolygon wrote:
         | neovim is what I've switched to. Ironically, using ChatGPT has
         | made it easier to adopt and customize.
        
       | FpUser wrote:
       | I have subscription that covers all their tools. CLion is my
       | favorite when dealing with C++. So glad that hobbyist can use it
       | now
        
         | jasonlotito wrote:
         | So... not that it really matters I imagine, but JetBrains
         | doesn't do pure subscription. Rather, you buy your IDEs, and
         | effectively have a perpetual license to the product you bought.
         | You get free upgrades, and if you keep paying, your license
         | gets updated along with it.
         | 
         | If you don't continue paying, you still have the IDE you paid
         | for. You just don't get updates. This seems like a subtle
         | distinction, but I think it's an important one in the world of
         | subscription services.
         | 
         | https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
        
           | inetknght wrote:
           | So it's like what software licenses were 20 years ago. That's
           | a good thing.
        
           | FpUser wrote:
           | Yep. Having perpetual license is precondition for me buying
           | major development tools.
        
           | dismalaf wrote:
           | JetBrains does have a subscription option, including a
           | monthly subscription to get all their tools.
        
       | WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
       | I wish they'd extract the debugger and release it as a
       | crossplatform standalone tool, i'd pay for it
        
         | freeone3000 wrote:
         | The debugger is primarily lldb, which has the same features
         | (watches, expressions, locals) with not as slick a UI.
        
         | kanwisher wrote:
         | the debugger without the ide doesn't make any sense, just use
         | the ide for debugging
        
       | shortrounddev2 wrote:
       | Personally dislike jetbrains UX design but it's cool that Linux
       | has a really good, free-ish IDE
        
         | memsom wrote:
         | If you use more than one of their IDEs on a regular basis, I'm
         | going to be honest - it starts to make more sense that the
         | change between IDEs is less jarring. I use Rider a lot, and
         | Pycharm and Android Studio infrequently, and I like that all of
         | the IDEs are so similar that I know how to do most things as
         | the settings and menu system is almost identical. I also use
         | the IDEs on Windows, Mac and sometimes Linux - and the UI is
         | similar enough that I do not ever struggle to make something
         | work that I have previously done in any of the platforms or OS
         | versions
        
           | jghn wrote:
           | Also alternatives like VSCode have garbage for a debugging &
           | profiling workflow compared to Jetbrains.
        
       | videogreg93 wrote:
       | This is amazing news. As a long time IntelliJ user (Android dev
       | for 7+ years) who wants to start doing more c++, having free
       | access to Clion is a godsend.
        
         | eric-p7 wrote:
         | Nobody actually wants to start doing more c++.
        
       | discmonkey wrote:
       | Assuming that the plugin is enabled for the free version, CLion
       | is also amazing for Rust. Thanks Jetbrains!
       | 
       | Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will
       | no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder
       | if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the
       | IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode)
       | out there.
        
         | ainiriand wrote:
         | RustRover is already free for Non-Commercial use! I think it is
         | the best IDE for Rust dev.
        
           | weinzierl wrote:
           | Yes, it is quite nice. That being said I keep a little
           | statistic about IDE usage at the Rust events I attend. I have
           | observed RustRover or CLion only three times at the 48 events
           | I've recorded. One of these three was an event at JetBrains.
           | To be fair, I started my notes long before RustRover existed.
           | 
           | neovim is marginally more popular.
           | 
           | vscode is the crushing majority.
        
       | pasoevi wrote:
       | Great news. It is beyond me how people are complaining about the
       | free version not allowing to turn off telemetry. Why don't you
       | stick to the paid version if you are bothered by the (anonymous)
       | telemetry?
        
         | badsectoracula wrote:
         | Because these two are completely separate things.
        
           | pasoevi wrote:
           | How?
        
             | badsectoracula wrote:
             | See my reply to the other comment you made[0] where you
             | basically say the same thing.
             | 
             | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915600
        
         | ndriscoll wrote:
         | Same reason responsible technologists warned less-informed
         | users about installing BonziBuddy. It was a free product that
         | told jokes or whatever just as it said it would. It was also
         | spyware.
         | 
         | Responsible technologists should raise the alarm on spyware
         | products because they are harmful toward their users. Malware
         | is often given away for "free" (sometimes even sent to you
         | without you asking!), so it doesn't really make sense to say
         | "well that's the deal". Somehow people seem to be forgetting
         | this over the years (I suspect because a lot more technologists
         | make money from participating in the surveillance/malware
         | economy these days, and it's gotten so bad that some of them
         | have started to think malware distribution and exfiltrating
         | (and often selling) user data is not a thoroughly black-hat
         | activity).
         | 
         | If you're okay with adware or spyware or crypto miners or
         | botnet proxies or whatever else running on your computer as a
         | form of "payment", great. You consider that a reasonable
         | "transaction". Other people appreciate being warned about such
         | behavior. In any case, one shouldn't consider the product to be
         | "free" as advertised.
        
           | missinglugnut wrote:
           | Having a checkbox that says "opt out of usage statistics"
           | doesn't protect anyone against malware. Downloading from
           | trusted counterparties does.
        
             | ndriscoll wrote:
             | Gathering user consent is what makes the difference between
             | malware and not. If you click "Yes, upload this crash
             | report" or "Yes, upload stats on what buttons I click",
             | that's the program acting according to your wishes. If the
             | program gathers and transmits that data without you asking
             | or reviewing it and against your wishes, that's malware
             | (i.e. malicious software that causes the computer to
             | undermine its owner). Basically, does the computer obey the
             | owner or not?
        
       | hiq wrote:
       | I'm curious about what non-commercial means in practice.
       | 
       | > Common examples of non-commercial uses include learning and
       | self-education, open-source contributions without earning
       | commercial benefits
       | 
       | What if I start writing code, let's say 80% of a codebase, then
       | for the next 3 months I switch to another editor to write the
       | next 20%, and then commercialize the support (so open-source but
       | with commercial benefits)? Would it be about intent, i.e. it'd be
       | fine if I had no plan to make a business out of it at the
       | beginning, but as soon as there's the idea of a business I should
       | have switched?
       | 
       | I guess in practice this mostly targets companies with 10+
       | employees so it's fine not to draw the line that clearly?
        
         | speed_spread wrote:
         | It means "stay under the radar if you are cheap". This is
         | Jetbrains, not Oracle, there isn't an army of lawyers out to
         | get you the second you breach the agreement.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | It's a shame but not unexpected that people reward smaller
           | companies giving their products away for free by trying to
           | abuse the spirit of it.
        
         | deafpolygon wrote:
         | Probably why they want telemetry. Then, if you go on to make
         | billions- they can sue when it's worth it.
        
       | subzero06 wrote:
       | If something is free, you are the product - it is "free" but
       | Anonymous data is collected.
        
         | dist-epoch wrote:
         | Exactly, this I why I won't use Linux or Firefox, I don't want
         | to be the product.
        
           | creatonez wrote:
           | Most Linux distros are completely free of any builtin
           | telemetry. Your fears are unwarranted.
        
             | 333c wrote:
             | I believe that's the point being made by the comment you're
             | replying to
        
             | cbpowell wrote:
             | My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that the guy was
             | being sarcastic.
        
               | thadt wrote:
               | We at the HN do not have a sense of humor we're aware of.
        
           | inetknght wrote:
           | Linux is free as in _free speech_. It 's also _open source_.
           | 
           | Firefox... is free as in _free beer_.
        
             | noisem4ker wrote:
             | Firefox is covered by the Mozilla Public License (MPL),
             | which is a free-as-in-freedom, open source software
             | license.
             | 
             | What's your definition of freedom?
        
               | inetknght wrote:
               | > _Firefox is covered by the Mozilla Public License
               | (MPL), which is a free-as-in-freedom_
               | 
               | Firefox is subject to a non-free terms of use.
               | 
               | > _What 's your definition of freedom?_
               | 
               | Let me use the software without limitation.
        
               | creatonez wrote:
               | This AUP is related to the optional backend services run
               | by Mozilla. The frontends for all of these services are
               | open source, with no usage restrictions. It doesn't
               | affect how Firefox is licensed in terms of copyright.
               | Additionally, the backends for some of these services
               | (such as Firefox Sync and Mozilla Accounts) are fully
               | open source, so you could avoid the AUP if you wanted to.
        
         | ____________g wrote:
         | I generally agree with the sentiment--if something is free,
         | there's often a tradeoff. But when there's a paid tier, the
         | free version can act more like an entry point or hook to get
         | users into the ecosystem, rather than relying on harvesting
         | user data. In JetBrains' case, broad adoption brings a lot of
         | strategic value on its own (like establishing industry
         | standards or building community mindshare), so it makes sense
         | for them to offer a genuinely free version without necessarily
         | treating users as the product.
        
       | toprerules wrote:
       | Every once in a while I fire up the old JetBrains Java monolith
       | to see if it's finally surpassed my open source setup for the
       | 200$ a year and up price tag and locked in spyware. Turns out
       | it's actually somehow worse than previous iterations now that I
       | need AI integrations, their models are awful, it's still a clunky
       | resource hog on it's own, and there's nothing you can get for
       | 200$ that you can't get paying yourself and installing some
       | VSCode or Vim plugins that do the same stuff for free (and
       | without the spyware).
        
         | NoboruWataya wrote:
         | Agree that it is a crazy resource hog and I don't like the AI
         | integrations either. But I gotta say for UI and features it is
         | very good. I haven't been able to get VSCode or neovim to offer
         | the same kind of easily actionable code diagnostics and
         | suggestions as JetBrains IDEs do out of the box. I'm not saying
         | it's not possible, but I couldn't quite match it even with a
         | fair bit of tinkering.
        
           | KronisLV wrote:
           | I like the AI integrations (they me use Claude Sonnet 3.7,
           | Gemini 2.5 and GPT 4.1 with my all products pack) and quite
           | enjoy their Junie tool, much better than my attempts at
           | getting Aider working.
           | 
           | UI seems pretty okay, at least on the 2025 versions of the
           | tools (in compact mode, Inter 12 as the custom UI font on a
           | 1080p monitor) but still quite the resource hog.
           | 
           | Oh well, I'm actually going to try their Fleet as well after
           | reinstalling my OS because it was worse than VSC the last
           | time I tried it, might be better now.
        
             | sitefail1 wrote:
             | It's not. The functionality gap between VSC and Fleet has
             | further widened, and its future looks even more unsure now
             | they backed out the Kotlin native stuff back to the main
             | IDEs.
        
         | jillesvangurp wrote:
         | The community edition of intellij and pycharm is Apache 2.0
         | licensed and you can use those for commercial development.
         | Pycharm is about similar to vs code (I've used both). But
         | intellij blows the Java & Kotlin support in vs code out of the
         | water. It's not even remotely close. Reason, Java has several
         | decent OSS IDEs as an alternative and those would win by
         | default if the only option was a paid IDE. Clion and Rustover
         | are somewhere in between I suspect.
         | 
         | VS Code plugins vary from language to language. And commercial
         | non OSS tools for native development are pretty common (e.g.
         | Visual Studio, XCode, etc.). So, I guess Jetbrains feels more
         | comfortable charging for Clion and Rustover for commercial
         | development because they know they are that good. But nothing
         | wrong if you don't appreciate what is on offer.
         | 
         | Yes these tools use some memory and CPU. But then I use a
         | decent laptop as well so it doesn't matter to me. Pretty normal
         | to be spending on proper tools if you do this stuff
         | professionally.
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | > Pycharm is about similar to vs code
           | 
           | You and I have had _vastly_ different experiences. PyCharm,
           | like the rest of their tooling, will catch the most amazing
           | bugs and LSPs don 't hold a candle to that
        
         | ____________g wrote:
         | I'm intrigued--what's your setup? Do you use any advanced
         | refactoring features like Change Signature or Extract Selected
         | Members? It's been a couple of years since I last tried setting
         | up Java in VS Code, and I'm curious how far things have come.
         | Intuitively, I'd expect JetBrains to have the upper hand in
         | this area, since they can build specialized UIs for complex
         | tasks, rather than being constrained by the limitations of the
         | Language Server Protocol.
        
           | troupo wrote:
           | > I'm intrigued--what's your setup?
           | 
           | Quite often it's vim/emacs with a crazy collection of plugins
           | and custom-written scripts where the most powerful tool is a
           | fuzzy search.
           | 
           | Surprisingly few people know what an actual powerful IDE can
           | even do.
        
             | toprerules wrote:
             | Incorrect, many of them do, and make the determination that
             | a few nice to have features doesn't outweigh the cost, lock
             | in, and incongruence with the use of open source software
             | where possible.
             | 
             | I know several world class developers who have invented
             | corner stone technologies that use text editors without any
             | plugins and just run the compiler in a separate window. It
             | turns out that you actually are not held back by not having
             | your hand held by an IDE, it was just a skill issue.
        
               | troupo wrote:
               | > Incorrect, many of them do,
               | 
               | Most of the time in these discussions it's revealed that
               | no, they don't.
               | 
               | The rest is a non-sequitur
               | 
               | Edit: Oh. You don't know either
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917174
        
               | the__alchemist wrote:
               | This gives me the impression that you are speaking about
               | something you don't have tacit experience with.
        
           | toprerules wrote:
           | Nowadays I just use an LLM. None of these features are
           | relevant anymore. Unless JetBrains has a proprietary LLM that
           | is better at coding than what ever else is on the market
           | (they don't) then there's no reason to pay money for their
           | products.
           | 
           | I am not even particularly bullish on AI, but not seeing how
           | LLMs have made IDEs irrelevant is like using Vim and crying
           | foul about IDEs without trying one out.
        
         | simion314 wrote:
         | My example, my coworkers use VS code, so I review their code
         | and my IDE is highlighting a few bugs in a function, bugs like
         | $x is not defined , so I ask if thir IDE does not show any
         | warning for that code, and yes, VS Code had ZERO warnings. The
         | dev copy pasted some code but forgot this $x variable in,
         | either he needed to copy it or remove it.
         | 
         | So I am sure someone will say that after you install VS code
         | you should install X and Y plugins or some npm packages that
         | you trigger later in the build to catch this errors. With
         | Intellij I get them without screwing around with VS code
         | plugins or vim plugins, and I also feel good that I pay some
         | developers to work on a tool I use then use Microsoft product
         | that would instantly fuck me over when Intellij would be killed
         | by this unfair competition. Or did I read recently Microsoft
         | already started with their bullshit related to the extensions
         | and AI ?
        
       | zoobab wrote:
       | So it will never be in Debian.
        
       | hbn wrote:
       | I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors
       | to offer free access for non-commercial use. I've never made any
       | money off of my occasional side projects, so I could never
       | justify the cost to pay for a license when I may go an entire
       | year without using. But I really love their editors - their key
       | mappings are an extension of me at this point, it's so smart
       | about figuring out how the code works and letting you find usages
       | or refactor without thinking, and their git UI is basically the
       | only way I find git tolerable.
       | 
       | I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university
       | let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years
       | out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop
       | working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily
       | take this instead!
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | > _I 'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their
         | editors to offer free access for non-commercial use._
         | 
         | All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting
         | ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on
         | https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion,
         | Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use.
         | Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted
         | licenses for certain users (e.g. students).
        
           | jackwilsdon wrote:
           | There are community editions of IDEA and PyCharm which are
           | free for commercial use too.
        
             | wing-_-nuts wrote:
             | Right, but goland, and importantly the go plugin for
             | intellij are both not free, which is a bummer
        
           | NoboruWataya wrote:
           | I have been using PyCharm, IDEA and Android Studio for free
           | for a while now. I'm not a student or any special category of
           | user. I think you only get "core" features for free but they
           | sure still among the most featureful IDEs that I have used.
        
           | hbn wrote:
           | Well, I said "has been," as in, in-the-process!
           | 
           | I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's
           | strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-
           | commercial license. But so far they've been consistently
           | opening them up one-by-one.
        
             | NoahKAndrews wrote:
             | It'll be interesting to see what they do for PyCharm and
             | IntelliJ, which already have free Community Editions. Long
             | term, I doubt they'll want to have two types of free
             | version that restrict usage in completely different ways,
             | but if they kill the Community Editions, anyone using them
             | for commercial use will have to either build from source
             | (hopefully the end of community editions wouldn't mean the
             | end of the open source parts), start paying, or switch to
             | an alternative.
             | 
             | I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's
             | a lot of ways it could go.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | "Has been opening" is the present perfect continuous tense
           | [0], which describes something that started in the past and
           | is still ongoing. In TFA JetBrains says explicitly that this
           | is a process that they intend to continue assuming it goes
           | well.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/present-perfect-
           | conti...
        
         | dardeaup wrote:
         | Not all of them. I believe it's IntelliJ, Rider, CLion and
         | maybe 1 or 2 others. GoLand for example is not yet free for
         | non-commercial use.
        
           | NoahKAndrews wrote:
           | It's CLion, Rider, RustRover, and WebStorm, IntelliJ is not
           | on the list.
           | 
           | So far they haven't muddied the waters for any versions that
           | already had free Community Editions (IntelliJ and PyCharm).
           | The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict
           | commercial use.
        
             | Defletter wrote:
             | > The Community Editions are more limited, but don't
             | restrict commercial use.
             | 
             | I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products
             | Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have
             | the Educational licence when I was in university. What was
             | there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I
             | get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted
             | towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but
             | to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't
             | commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have
             | any the wiser?
        
               | NoahKAndrews wrote:
               | As far as I know the commercial use restriction is pretty
               | much entirely the honor system, with some risk of a
               | lawsuit if they found out somehow.
        
         | vishnugupta wrote:
         | They have this terrific plan where if you buy yearly
         | subscription you will get the major version free for life even
         | after you stop paying after one year.
         | 
         | I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered it. Been using it
         | since then for like 3-4 years now.
        
       | William_BB wrote:
       | I used to be a CLion user. Unfortunately, it could not keep up
       | with our large and heavily templated C++ codebase. Although CLion
       | Nova with the new ReSharper engine improved things a lot, we
       | found our custom clangd with emacs/vim/VSCode to still be much
       | faster and convenient.
       | 
       | I know CLion also has clangd, but I believe it's their own fork.
       | I am also not sure if you can enable all clangd features since
       | it's not the main engine. I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts
       | about this.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | My experience has been than complaining into HN does not result
         | in changes to software. Have you submitted a profiling dump to
         | YouTrack?
         | 
         | I have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to make an IDE (or
         | any introspection tooling) because the number of ways humans
         | can come up with to organize or author code is unlimited. So,
         | I'm sure they would welcome feedback on "hey, watch out,
         | modeling templates using this mechanism has bad perf in this
         | IDE component"
        
           | William_BB wrote:
           | Not complaining at all! I have just heard of other people
           | facing the same issues and assumed that this must be a well-
           | known problem. It might also just be template heavy projects
           | -- maybe it works great otherwise. I don't have much
           | experience with CLion in other contexts.
        
             | koakuma-chan wrote:
             | I had the same experience with a large and heavily macroed
             | Rust codebase.
        
           | varispeed wrote:
           | Why would you do that for a commercial product without
           | getting paid?
        
             | nilamo wrote:
             | Why would you pay for a product and never want it to
             | improve your workflows?
        
           | throwaway51034 wrote:
           | It's a commercial product. Expecting people to work for free
           | for a billion dollar company seems a little out of touch.
           | JetBrains can contact GP and discuss rates if they value that
           | data.
        
       | sgt wrote:
       | Incidentally, I recently tested Zig and I decided to try out
       | CLion as the Zig IDE. Seems to work great with the ZigBrains
       | plugin. It's still in development but ready for use.
        
         | cgh wrote:
         | Thank you, this is excellent information. Hopefully it beats
         | the Kate + LSP experience.
        
       | wizrrd wrote:
       | Make all IDEs free for non-commercial use to attract more users
       | who might pay for services in the future -- a win-win strategy.
        
       | inetknght wrote:
       | Oh hell yeah! I used CLion about 6 or 7 years ago at my job, and
       | it was a pretty _great_ product for small projects. It used to
       | slow down really bad for a medium-sized project though and I
       | switched to VSCode.
       | 
       | I've since moved on to new employers, but I'd love to check it
       | out again.
       | 
       | > _It's important to note that, if you're using a non-commercial
       | license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage
       | statistics. We use this information to improve our products._
       | 
       | Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use
       | VSCodium.
       | 
       | But I'm heavily against Microsoft. I don't _like_ usage
       | statistics collection, but at least this is a direct competitor
       | to Microsoft.
       | 
       | I had a chance to speak to some of the JetBrains folk at CppCon a
       | couple years back. It was really nice and reassuring.
       | 
       | I'll check it out for personal projects and see if it's improved
       | since years ago. :)
        
         | riquito wrote:
         | > > It's important to note that, if you're using a non-
         | commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of
         | anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve
         | our products.
         | 
         | > Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now
         | use VSCodium.
         | 
         | How's that "basically true"? That's false. You can opt out. In
         | fact there's very good documentation around that
         | 
         | https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/telemetry
        
           | hyper57 wrote:
           | According to Microsoft's own license terms for VS Code, you
           | can't opt out of all telemetry; see Section 2a:
           | https://code.visualstudio.com/license
           | 
           | > You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as
           | described in the product documentation located at
           | https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-
           | di....
           | 
           | Also, each extension (including Microsoft's) may collect its
           | own telemetry. The blog post
           | https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry
           | has more details.
           | 
           | Personally, I think it's a shame that JetBrains get such
           | flack for collecting telemetry in their free products when
           | Microsoft do the same in VS Code with hardly anyone voicing
           | the same level of criticism for it.
        
             | voidspark wrote:
             | > a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting
             | telemetry in their free products
             | 
             | Probably 99.99% of developers don't care.
             | 
             | The ones who complain about it online are a tiny vocal
             | minority.
        
         | nsm wrote:
         | Jdk improvements and the new Nova/Rider backend how
         | dramatically improved JetBrains performance. I highly encourage
         | you to give it another shot.
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | It's wild to me that Jetbrains has been making so many top-tier
       | IDEs, languages, runtimes and other developer products for 25
       | years now and is valued at _maybe_ $5B, meanwhile we have months-
       | old  "pre-revenue" startups releasing AI coding wrappers and
       | raising money or being bought out for twice that.
        
         | OtomotO wrote:
         | The power of hype.
         | 
         | The same was true for Web3, Crypto, Machine Learning...
        
           | SJC_Hacker wrote:
           | Was crypto really hype? BTC has been around for almost 15
           | years now, and has been on a bumpy rise up to multiples of
           | its value
        
             | dgfitz wrote:
             | Ever heard that saying about finding the sucker at a poker
             | table?
        
               | raincole wrote:
               | I did. The first time I heard people describe crypto as
               | such, Bitcoin was at $5000.
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | The only good investment in crypto has been to buy and hold
             | BTC. So while it has worked well as an asset (like gold or
             | paintings or baseball cards), the crypto industry itself -
             | thousands of startups in the space, all the altcoins,
             | blockchains, smart contracts, web3, NFTs, ICOs, DeFi,
             | "stable" coins - have all either fizzled out or just been
             | outright fraud.
        
           | FergusArgyll wrote:
           | I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure
           | the vast majority of it _is_ but USDC alone market cap is
           | north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC.
           | You can 't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether
           | stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value
           | of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200
           | Billion - more than the value of OpenAI
        
         | atemerev wrote:
         | Well, that's the difference between being in Silicon Valley and
         | not being there.
        
           | oytis wrote:
           | Isn't this criterion just a bit irrational for people
           | entrusted with investing billions of dollars?
        
             | atemerev wrote:
             | People entrusted with investing billions of dollars are
             | very much not rational, as we can observe every day.
             | 
             | Additionally, network effects and experience input and VC
             | concentration in Silicon Valley are very real and very
             | rational. For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the
             | world are flocking towards you already?
             | 
             | This might change in the near future, but I doubt it.
        
               | hyperhopper wrote:
               | > For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world
               | are flocking towards you already?
               | 
               | Very false. A lot of the best in the world have no
               | intention of ever living in silicon valley. In my circles
               | people dread even a week long trip there.
        
         | ToucanLoucan wrote:
         | Because the products being good isn't what investors look for.
         | Investors look for good business. And, assuming they can
         | actually make it work, putting together AI coding apps that get
         | software "engineers" to outsource enough of their thinking to a
         | machine that they can then jack the price through the ceiling
         | on and make bank via enterprise billing is incredibly good
         | business.
         | 
         | However that is a load bearing if.
        
         | TiredOfLife wrote:
         | Cursor is 2 and Windsurf is 3 years old.
        
           | miroljub wrote:
           | Those are not even IDEs. They are just forks of a fork.
        
             | TiredOfLife wrote:
             | Which ide VS Code is a fork of?
        
               | paxys wrote:
               | Not a direct fork but VS Code was built on the foundation
               | of Atom, and heavily inspired by it. People generally
               | consider VS Code to be the successor of Atom, especially
               | after Microsoft bought out the creator of Atom/Electron
               | (Github) and shut down the project.
        
               | make3 wrote:
               | and Atom is an electron clone of Sublime Text
        
               | shagie wrote:
               | The history is slightly different...
               | 
               | Atom was an editor made by GitHub that competed with
               | Sublime.
               | 
               | After creating Atom, GitHub pulled the editor guts out of
               | it and initially called it "Atom Shell".
               | https://github.com/mapbox/atom-shell
               | 
               | This then had a name change of Atom Shell to Electron to
               | decouple Electron from Atom (the editor).
               | https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron
               | 
               | Microsoft built several key tools on top of Electron
               | (VSCode being the relevant one here) and became very
               | interested in maintaining control of it... and so bought
               | GitHub when it was up for sale.
               | 
               | Eventually, Atom was sunsetted. https://github.blog/news-
               | insights/product-news/sunsetting-at...
               | 
               | > Atom has not had significant feature development for
               | the past several years, though we've conducted
               | maintenance and security updates during this period to
               | ensure we're being good stewards of the project and
               | product. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and
               | evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has
               | declined significantly. As a result, we've decided to
               | sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer
               | experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
               | 
               | > This is a tough goodbye. It's worth reflecting that
               | Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron
               | framework, which paved the way for the creation of
               | thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio
               | Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However,
               | reliability, security, and performance are core to
               | GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer
               | community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize
               | technologies that enable the future of software
               | development.
        
               | TiredOfLife wrote:
               | VS Code is built on the foundation of Monaco. And when
               | you run it in a browser it has nothing common with Atom.
               | And on desktop the only thing from Atom is the runtime
               | Atom shell now called Electron and it is essentially
               | Chrome with some glue for integrating with OS.
        
             | make3 wrote:
             | Cursor is still great though, and was a real step forward,
             | despite what a lot of people here will say
        
         | keepamovin wrote:
         | Aw shit, I guess I should stop doing actual products and just
         | go where the fad is. That's what the "smart money" does, I
         | guess. I mean, isn't it smart to pursue maximal profit? Max
         | payoff - you can use it to fund other things!!!
        
           | ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
           | You're being sarcastic but yes. If your intention is to take
           | large sums of cash from investors and run off with a fat
           | check then that is exactly what you should do.
        
             | keepamovin wrote:
             | No I'm actually not being sarcastic. I know it might sound
             | like that - it's hard to grok tone from text and I'm not
             | particularly concerned. But I'm seriously considering it, I
             | mean -- the goal of most startups is to solve (as PG puts
             | it) "the money problem". So what am I doing building
             | products, when I could be chasing these fads and possibly
             | banking huge? I mean, that's smart, right?
             | 
             | I'm not being sarcastic at all. I feel I need to reiterate
             | that because you got it wrong.
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | If enough of the market participants act stupid, or at
               | least in predictably irrational ways, it may be
               | profitable to capitalize on that behavior.
               | 
               | If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom
               | boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work
               | well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue
               | "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a
               | crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some
               | of the money from it.
        
               | ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
               | Some people might say there is more to life than making
               | money but if you just want to hopefully get some naive
               | investors to give you a large pile of money for your
               | vaporware then go for it, it's where the money is.
        
         | homebrewer wrote:
         | Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result:
         | JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these
         | "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long
         | before that.
        
           | hbn wrote:
           | But their founders ran off with a fat paycheck so the system
           | worked as intended
        
             | asadm wrote:
             | Life is like that, some are more blessed than others in
             | some metric. You gotta make your own lemonade.
        
           | riku_iki wrote:
           | I (and many others) use LLM for coding tasks multiple times a
           | day, its very unlikely they will go the way of NFTs.
        
             | Eggpants wrote:
             | Then your "code" is riddled with bugs. Coding by Statistics
             | will only end in tears.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | I didn't say I blindly trust generated code, it needs to
               | be read through and covered by tests, but tasks like
               | generate boilerplate code for some lib I never used
               | before and which would take time to locate and read
               | through documentation now are 10x faster.
               | 
               | There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete
               | working code.
        
               | asdsadasdasd123 wrote:
               | This is just cope. We've rolled out cursor company wide
               | with no noticeable uptick in bugs.
        
             | lolinder wrote:
             | Most "AI" startups aren't building coding tools, and the
             | utility of this tech goes down dramatically in industries
             | that are less legible on the open internet than software
             | is.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | > industries that are less legible on the open internet
               | 
               | I think there will be also wave of private LLMs fine-
               | tuned on corporate data, and it will be also good tools.
        
           | nsonha wrote:
           | They're a great company but geopolitics is working against
           | them.
           | 
           | Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud,
           | that's lazy.
        
             | bitwize wrote:
             | It's not us lumping AI together with fraud. It's the
             | companies employing, for example, Actually Indians to do
             | things they claim are done by machine. Or the ones
             | marketing ChatGPT with various agentic hookups as a
             | replacement for developers. Or...
        
             | devmor wrote:
             | I believe that's why the comment author put "AI" in
             | quotation marks. There's a massive amount of fraud around
             | "AI" right now, as there always is in the startup scene
             | with a hot new technology.
        
               | nsonha wrote:
               | there is still a distinction as the field itself is not a
               | hoax, which I can't say the same about NFT.
               | 
               | Unless you prefer to think of the AI field as
               | representable by a bunch of Indians actually behind
               | software, as the sibling (insincerely and again lazily)
               | reduces it to.
        
               | bitwize wrote:
               | Where am I reducing an entire field to anything? If one
               | truthfully says there's a bunch of companies doing this
               | or that, that associate AI with fraud, that's not the
               | same as reducing an entire field to fraud.
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | Engineers that want to run startups need to stop
               | denouncing fields they don't like as "fraud". Some people
               | made more money than you. Learn from them and it could be
               | you next time.
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | > geopolitics is working against them.
             | 
             | Do most people even know they're a Russian company? Do
             | businesses decide not to invest for that reason?
        
               | rsynnott wrote:
               | They're _not_; the founders are Russian but it was
               | founded in the Czech Republic and no longer has Russian
               | operations or sells to Russia.
        
               | momocowcow wrote:
               | There are no native Czech speakers in their management.
               | It's a similar story as the Yandex guys going off to
               | Nebius Group in the Netherlands after the invasion.
        
               | shuuzo wrote:
               | Do you know how many founders in Silicon Valley are not
               | native English speakers? What are you even talking about?
        
               | mananaysiempre wrote:
               | Nobody in Russia who valued their business chose to
               | incorporate it--or at least its parent company--in
               | Russia. After Yukos, the writing was on the wall. (And
               | now, of course, everybody who values their business takes
               | pains to point out their chosen country of incorporation
               | as though it wasn't originally just a saner jurisdiction.
               | As you've shown, everybody does it because it works.)
               | JetBrains specifically did employ a fair number of both
               | Russians and Ukrainians, though, and unlike Yandex or
               | mobile carriers, was not prominent enough to be forced to
               | split immediately after 2014, so it was inevitable they
               | would have to move out of Russia (and they did so pretty
               | gracefully).
        
               | grues-dinner wrote:
               | Presumably, if you wanted to stick the boot in on Russia,
               | a decent way to do that is to encourage smart,
               | economically productive Russians to incorporate outside
               | Russia and attract as many young capable Russians to come
               | with them as possible.
        
             | bakugo wrote:
             | The hundreds of AI startups desperately trying to convince
             | management that they can replace entire teams of skilled
             | humans with AI are, by definition, a scam. Maybe a
             | different type of scam than crypto rugpullers, but still a
             | scam.
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | In capitalism, a scam is when investors lose money
               | because you broke a law. Which law is being broken here?
        
               | grues-dinner wrote:
               | No, that's fraud. A scam can be legal. Timeshares,
               | "Winter Wonderlands", many extended warranties, planned
               | obsolescence, weaselly technically-correct advertising
               | (overpromising to investors is sort of this) pretty much
               | everything hidden in ToC screeds, some MLM schemes etc
               | etc.
               | 
               | Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
        
         | scialex wrote:
         | They are hoping that those companies will become like synopsys
         | and able to sell per seat subscriptions to their software for
         | huge amounts.
         | 
         | That or they just drank the Kool aid
        
         | lvass wrote:
         | This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way
         | since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately
         | owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome
         | until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company.
         | Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time
         | preference which makes everything turn to shit.
        
         | varispeed wrote:
         | Are these IDEs really top tier though? I found them slow and
         | laggy. Switching to even something like VS Code was night and
         | day difference.
         | 
         | I have PTSD from accidentally opening CLion or PyCharm. Fans
         | starts spinning and there is dozens of seconds wait to close
         | this thing down.
        
           | not_kurt_godel wrote:
           | As someone with decades of software engineering under my
           | belt, my opinion is they are the best IDEs out there by a
           | comfortable margin. It's possible the issue you're
           | encountering when accidentally opening them is due to index
           | updates which would occur disproportionately often on startup
           | for people who otherwise never use them. Other than that,
           | performance is more than satisfactory 90+% of the time in my
           | experience.
        
           | Maxatar wrote:
           | That's just it. In my company there are basically three sets
           | of developers. The very experienced ones prefer vim/emacs.
           | The experienced ones tend to like these more established
           | IDEs, and the younger developers absolutely hate these IDEs
           | and find them to be slow and bloated.
           | 
           | I can't really comment on whether they are good or not since
           | from my perspective I see people who are productive and
           | unproductive using both of these tools, so to me it just
           | looks like mostly a matter of preference. But newer
           | developers don't seem to like these established IDEs and see
           | them as you said: big, slow and laggy.
        
             | varispeed wrote:
             | I work fast and I have ADD. If I have to wait for the tool
             | to do something and it breaks my flow, I am out. It is
             | simple as that.
             | 
             | Some people like slow IDEs, because that gives them time to
             | have a cuppa or browse Reddit when the "index is updating".
             | I have no time for that.
        
           | koakuma-chan wrote:
           | Have you tried Fleet? It's a next generation IDE from
           | JetBrains and some of it is written in Rust.
        
             | NoahKAndrews wrote:
             | It seems like JetBrains may be giving up on Fleet. Honestly
             | though, I think their established IDEs are good enough to
             | be worth a few bugs and performance issues.
        
           | simion314 wrote:
           | Intellij is an IDE where VS Code is a bit mroe then a text
           | editor. When you open a project for the first time it takes
           | time because it is indexed , maybe it will index your
           | dependencies if you did not bother to disable that.
           | 
           | IWhen i open a file /project from a collegue that uses VS
           | Code is filled with errors and warnings because their VS code
           | text editor is not actually understanding the code they are
           | editing.
        
             | symlinkk wrote:
             | People that say this are completely out of touch. You know
             | there are VSCode extensions for Java (made by Oracle and
             | Redhat themselves), right? Once you install that you get
             | Intellisense, debugging, etc. Same with C#, Python, etc.
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | Can't speak for CLion, but for heavy python development,
           | PyCharm is much better than anything else out there that I
           | have tried.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | Nobody is going to acquire JetBrains at a crazy premium to
         | remove a competitor or to stay a competitor themselves.
         | OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Meta will.
         | 
         | The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies
         | fighting over startups.
         | 
         | Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing
         | this fad much at all.
        
           | nwatson wrote:
           | Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much
           | like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant,
           | seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic
           | models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models).
           | 
           | Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP
           | Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding
           | AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including
           | changing project configuration, listing / finding files,
           | editing files, looking at VCS diffs.
           | 
           | So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant
           | market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they
           | should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI
           | integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other
           | systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of
           | PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | > they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should
             | be
             | 
             | Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising
             | money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping
             | them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from
             | the conversation no matter how good your product is.
        
               | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
               | See further: Aider.
        
               | skeeter2020 wrote:
               | They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment
               | over the years. They make good stuff and their audience
               | (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to
               | pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that
               | they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't
               | like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with
               | an alternative approach?
        
               | Applejinx wrote:
               | Good. I use their stuff or at least I'm starting to use
               | it more, and I don't want them acquired and enshittified.
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | I've had a Jetbrains license for years. I barely use their
           | stuff now. Cursor is much less capable IDE but better coding
           | environment. At first I'd use them both on the same thing but
           | now it's all Cursor.
        
             | senordevnyc wrote:
             | Exact same here. I love PHPStorm for Laravel dev, but I've
             | barely used it in months. Meanwhile I'm paying $100+ per
             | month to Cursor for subscription + premium model usage. And
             | honestly I kinda hate Cursor as an editor / IDE. I really
             | hope Junie is good enough to switch back, but I won't give
             | up integrated AI agentic coding in my editor if it's not.
        
               | trallnag wrote:
               | Is it really better than VS Code with GitHub Copilot
               | though? I kinda doubt it
        
         | SJC_Hacker wrote:
         | The thought is if AI turns out to be what its billed as, you
         | won't need IDEs.
         | 
         | It would be like investing in a horse-and-buggy whip
         | manufacturers around the turn of the century.
        
           | nine_k wrote:
           | The fun thing is that JetBrains do have AI, and it's pretty
           | good.
           | 
           | They can't invest in AI the amounts that Microsoft can, of
           | course.
        
             | falleng0d wrote:
             | You can use Copilot and a bunch of new Agents such as
             | augment and firebender which are very good.
             | 
             | In the worst case you'll still be able to use AI tooling
             | similar or equal to what you have in VS code. Even Windsurf
             | has an JetBrains plugin.
        
           | jimbokun wrote:
           | Well in that case you won't need tools like Cursor either.
           | 
           | Just vibe code away and never look at the source it's
           | generating.
        
         | duped wrote:
         | People love to crap on VC but it's a great transfer of wealth
         | from the rich that have so much money they can give it to other
         | people to gamble for them by paying people to drop out of
         | school to build things that will never make a return on
         | investment. \s
        
           | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
           | From pension funds and insurance companies, you mean?
        
         | tomjen3 wrote:
         | I have stopped using Jetbrains to switch to Windsurf. Their
         | "mere wrapper" is that good.
        
           | regularjack wrote:
           | JetBrains AI now does essentially the same thing as Windsurf
           | and Cursor. My prediction: JeBrains IDEs will be around in 5
           | years, Windsurf and Cursor won't.
        
             | tomjen3 wrote:
             | True, in the sense that VIM and Emacs both edit files.
        
             | senordevnyc wrote:
             | I hope you mean Junie, because their old AI assistant is
             | shit. And Junie isn't available for all the JetBrains IDEs
             | yet.
             | 
             | But overall I hope you're right, I really want great
             | agentic coding in PHPStorm.
        
         | emsign wrote:
         | That's called dumb money, because greed lowers the IQ.
        
         | dismalaf wrote:
         | It's the difference between bootstrapped companies and VC
         | backed or public ones. Bootstrapped companies don't have any
         | growth expectations whereas the funded ones do and are priced
         | based entirely on speculation.
        
         | csallen wrote:
         | Some relevant and timeless facts:
         | 
         | - Generating revenue from customers is about more than just
         | creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of
         | customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists
         | think only product matters (or _should_ matter), and neglect
         | distribution. But most people eventually come to understand
         | that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of
         | physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is
         | quite good generating revenue, and I 'm fairly certain their
         | revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)
         | 
         | - Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what
         | alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your
         | customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your
         | customer is your "acquirer."
         | 
         | - In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor.
         | Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an
         | acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value
         | of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best
         | done through growth trajectories.
         | 
         | - It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year
         | after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a
         | waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant
         | when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for
         | them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in
         | the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to
         | defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | This should be nailed to the wall.
           | 
           | Almost everyone here is providing business value in service
           | of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost
           | centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
        
           | gizmo686 wrote:
           | When analyzing the value of a young, pre revenue company, one
           | of the things you want to look it is how established
           | comparable companies are valued. For AI coding assistants,
           | the field is too young to do that directly. However, they are
           | competing in the space of "developer productivity tool for
           | writing code". That space is an established market that is
           | currently dominated by IDEs.
           | 
           | Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are
           | competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding
           | assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger
           | space does not compute.
           | 
           | Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI
           | coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves
           | itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be
           | the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a
           | feature in their established products.
           | 
           | All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space
           | look a lot like a bubble.
        
             | sgc wrote:
             | Reading a bit between the lines, it seems like the buyers
             | either 1) think that ai assisted coding will get good
             | enough that a lot more people will be doing it - that in
             | the future companies in other fields will spend on it for
             | their employees much the way they are paying for general ai
             | assistants now. Or 2) more likely, they think they will get
             | good enough to completely replace programmers, and the
             | current coding assistant's role is mainly to gather
             | information from developers to eventually replace them
             | completely, by selling a spinoff product at a much higher
             | price. They think they need spyware, and coding assistants
             | are the best version available.
        
             | csallen wrote:
             | This analysis framework you're providing would've missed
             | YouTube (pre-revenue; no incumbent successes; crowded with
             | competitors like Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc). It
             | would've missed Instagram (pre-revenue; no massive photo-
             | focused incumbents; tons of competing photo sharing apps in
             | the App Store at the time; no moat against a big social app
             | adding filters). It probably. would've missed WhatsApp. And
             | many others.
             | 
             | Which suggests that your framework is lacking.
             | 
             | Here's where:
             | 
             | 1. You're neglecting to look at the _differences_ between
             | the fast-rising stars and the comparable incumbents, and
             | instead you 're assuming that the incumbents automatically
             | represent a ceiling. In this particular case, JetBrains
             | obviously isn't the most ambitious company on the planet,
             | and isn't focused on hyper growth. There are plenty of
             | avenues for AI IDEs to grow and expand their revenue that
             | have yet to be explored.
             | 
             | 2. You're overestimating the importance of concrete moats.
             | Google had no concrete moat either. Just because people can
             | switch easily doesn't mean they necessarily will.
             | 
             | 3. These companies aren't pre-revenue. I believe JetBrains
             | is making something like $400-$500 million dollars a year,
             | after 25 years. Cursor is at half of that in just 2 years.
             | Windsurf is also doing big numbers.
             | 
             | 4. Related to #3, you're underestimating growth
             | trajectories.
             | 
             | 5. You're leaving out the context. Companies that can
             | afford to make $3B acquisitions (a) have tremendous war
             | chests, and (b) have extremely ambitious goals. They're not
             | looking to build the next JetBrains, they're looking to
             | join the pantheon of $1T companies. Achieving massive 10x
             | or 100x or 1000x growth as an investor/owner requires
             | making asymmetrical bets -- bets where if you lose you're
             | still okay, but if you win, you win big.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | It's not a waste of emotional energy to consider how to
           | convert a company from the $5-billion slow and steady type to
           | the $10-billion instant acquisition type. Indeed the premise
           | of our economic system is that maximum value is created when
           | people continually strive to maximize the values of their
           | companies.
        
         | pacetherace wrote:
         | That's pretty much the comparison between Tesla and old-time
         | car manufacturers. Most people who are trading Tesla stock
         | don't even look at other car stocks.
        
         | giancarlostoro wrote:
         | What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and
         | I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin
         | Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps
         | (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of
         | those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object)
         | and produce native and highly performant binaries.
         | 
         | It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really
         | hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be
         | AOT'd someday.
         | 
         | I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in
         | standstill. There's even some language features that are still
         | missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even
         | Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
        
           | ternaryoperator wrote:
           | Programming languages are high-cost, low-revenue beasts. When
           | Kotlin was first released, JB was hoping it would replace
           | Java in the enterprise. And as the sole providers of Kotlin
           | tools, they'd have a greatly expanded market.
           | 
           | Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has
           | a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue
           | stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it
           | internally, etc.
           | 
           | We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on
           | conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was
           | not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate
           | further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly
           | increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently
           | foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
        
           | raincole wrote:
           | The irony is that there are a lot of "XYZ Native" solution,
           | such as Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Xaramin, etc. But
           | somehow only React Native, something based on a web
           | framework, seems to reach the critical mass.
        
           | neonsunset wrote:
           | There are fundamental restrictions where NativeAOT will never
           | work or be desirable. For example, runtime-compiled regex
           | patterns or any other feature which relies on emitting IL at
           | runtime and creating new members or even assembles and then
           | loading them. Similar applies to compiled expression trees -
           | they are supported in NativeAOT but in the form of falling
           | back onto interpreting them, which has worse performance. Or
           | unbound reflection with patterns that cannot be statically
           | proven and/or analyzed.
           | 
           | Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are
           | hard constraints - a correctly working expression like
           | 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition
           | would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in
           | the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes
           | unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code
           | which does exactly this.
           | 
           | The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core
           | is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI,
           | EF Core has _some_ compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is
           | tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a
           | solved problem although you may need to use a different API.
           | 
           | At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be
           | fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions
           | (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go)
           | and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which
           | specifically exploit it but is also a performance
           | optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection
           | especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into
           | JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of
           | that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it
           | elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove
           | dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations,
           | and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a
           | toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases,
           | usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good
           | fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).
           | 
           | The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower
           | stems from _other_ sources of performance overhead that are
           | typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which
           | have  "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation
           | itself. There _are_ technicalities like certain calls have to
           | be indirect in order to support patching the callee address,
           | or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under
           | AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers /callees may be
           | constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would
           | invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional
           | memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding
         | tools and they seem to be very good.
         | 
         | They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.
         | 
         | I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose
         | perspective on their products was crystallized back in the
         | 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of
         | RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just
         | don't care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
         | 
         | JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input,
         | which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about
         | developer experience.
        
           | 0x1ceb00da wrote:
           | They have such a nice product! But every release comes with
           | almost the same number of bugfixes and new bugs. I wish it
           | was a more stable product and they were more cautious about
           | adding new features. Every new feature comes with the risk of
           | adding more bugs.
        
             | luckylion wrote:
             | I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of
             | products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of
             | "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably
             | added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to
             | fight for a day to get rid of".
             | 
             | Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that
             | Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to
             | look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every
             | level.
        
             | bandoti wrote:
             | Honestly this is why I use emacs. Editors like VS Code
             | even, while have some conveniences built in, update every
             | five minutes it seems.
             | 
             | My workflow is somewhat Byzantine--mostly just use shells
             | and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do
             | (sure somewhat worse).
             | 
             | That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and
             | that's it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for
             | context.
             | 
             | Like taking notes with a pencil and paper--which helps
             | information uptake--I believe it's actually important to
             | slow down and take a moment to think.
        
             | simion314 wrote:
             | You have the option to not update in place. Download the
             | new version and keep the old one too, then test the new
             | version, if they broke your workflow go back to the old
             | version until the bugs are fixed.
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost
           | 10 years, and I'm not impressed.
           | 
           | Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor
           | Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are
           | some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it
           | works...
           | 
           | AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not
           | activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And
           | doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some
           | batch processing?..
           | 
           | People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's
           | way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
        
             | foepys wrote:
             | Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for
             | over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's
             | all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had
             | plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.
             | 
             | Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has
             | been smooth sailing for me.
        
           | serial_dev wrote:
           | I am using their free product, IntelliJ CE (community
           | edition). I simply couldn't get used to VS code and its AI
           | derivatives.
           | 
           | Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays
           | for every engineers' Cursor usage, can't imagine how much it
           | could cost, but they don't have any encouraged integration
           | with JetBrains... so while JetBrains products are good, I'm
           | wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype
           | pushing them to higher valuations
        
             | spullara wrote:
             | Augment has a great extension for jetbrains products. Much
             | better than their AI tools (and better than cursor for
             | large code bases).
        
           | raincole wrote:
           | > The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding
           | tools and they seem to be very good.
           | 
           | Which one?
           | 
           | Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably
           | bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I
           | hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
           | 
           | Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't
           | tried Junie yet.
        
             | betterThanTexas wrote:
             | Seems to work fine for me, I haven't noticed it getting in
             | my way any more than any other assistant.
        
             | hiccuphippo wrote:
             | Funny, what sold me on AI was watching Andreas Kling work
             | on SerenityOS/LadyBird using CLion and it giving some
             | impressive suggestions.
        
         | vel0city wrote:
         | "If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will
         | never be enough. The company that was the 100x or 1000xer
         | becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say
         | you're pre-revenue; you're a potential pure play. It's not
         | about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And
         | who's worth the most? Companies that lose money."
         | 
         | - Russ Hanneman
        
           | adeptima wrote:
           | this guy .....
        
         | melenaboija wrote:
         | Well, all this is only a small fraction of the two trillions
         | Nvidia has gained in valuation since 2022.
        
         | karolist wrote:
         | I gave them a year of subscriptions before cancelling recently,
         | the devcontainer implementation in their Ultimate versions is
         | laughably bad, bugs upon bugs and tickets where their support
         | staff just bounces it up with "still no fix" messages and
         | customers are finding workarounds, i.e. downgrading docker
         | installs.
         | 
         | Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by
         | repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to
         | fix something in the integrated shell and giving up, but sadly
         | forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back
         | to nvim here, not for me.
        
           | symlinkk wrote:
           | +1, the Remote SSH is horrible. Takes forever to connect and
           | is extremely laggy once you have connected. Feels like
           | they're practically streaming video of the UI back to you
           | instead of VSCode's Remote SSH which feels indistinguishable
           | from running locally.
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | Not to mention that JetBrains is implementing AI agents into
         | their current products -- if I'm already a user of IntelliJ,
         | PyCharm or CLion, etc., why would I switch to Cursor or
         | Windsurf?
        
       | deafpolygon wrote:
       | When it's free, _you_ are the product:
       | 
       | "It's important to note that, if you're using a non-commercial
       | license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage
       | statistics. We use this information to improve our products. The
       | data we collect is exclusively that of anonymous feature usages
       | of our IDEs."
       | 
       | I'm aware it's common practice, but it's always good to read the
       | fine print.
        
         | sofixa wrote:
         | Do you think JetBrains are making money of usage statistics of
         | their IDE?
         | 
         | It's much more likely they use those stats to know which parts
         | and features of their products are used, and therefore which
         | need improvements/love/prominence.
        
           | deafpolygon wrote:
           | I have no idea what they're doing - only that now, the
           | product contains telemetry and if I want to use the free
           | product, I cannot opt-out. I don't consent to being tracked.
        
       | globalnode wrote:
       | If its free, you're the product.
        
         | not_kurt_godel wrote:
         | Yes, they want you to eventually convert to a paying customer
         | by using their software to make yourself money. How nefarious!
         | (/s)
        
       | iainctduncan wrote:
       | Worth mentioning too that they have free student plans for all
       | their IDEs for university students.
        
       | travisgriggs wrote:
       | Pycharm is my goto for Python; I happily use AndroidStudio when
       | working on our Android apps.
       | 
       | In the past when I tried CLion, I found that its need/desire to
       | use cmake prohibited me from really using it. We have our own
       | build scripts, and it seemed to struggle with that. Anyone know
       | if that CMake bias still exists?
       | 
       | I ended up using Nova on my Mac for C code and have been pretty
       | happy with that.
       | 
       | I would really really really love it if there was an Elixir skin
       | for Jetbrains tools.
        
         | chuckadams wrote:
         | clion still needs a cmakelists.txt that's good enough to index
         | the project, but it doesn't have to produce a usable artifact
         | -- you can still build with make or whatever else you want.
         | Probably cold comfort if you use a lot of third-party
         | libraries, but otherwise it's a fairly set-and-forget kind of
         | thing.
        
       | ferguess_k wrote:
       | Just curious, for low level mid-size projects ON LINUX, like a
       | simple OS or a compiler, is Clion over-complicated or suitable?
       | And how does the debugging look like?
       | 
       | I'm using VSCode with a manually written Makefile, and all of my
       | debugging lives in gdb tui mode in a separate terminal. I do
       | prefer a better UI though, but right now it's fine.
       | 
       | One concern is that Jetbriain IDEs usually takes a lot of memory.
       | I do have a 16GB laptop though, so should be fine.
        
       | 90s_dev wrote:
       | JetBrains IDEs always had difficult and unintuitive default
       | keyboard shortcuts. I think it's just because of its age (same is
       | true with Visual Studio). Whereas VS Code's out of the box
       | shortcuts were relatively great. If JetBrains IDEs shipped with
       | VSCode-style shortcuts as an option (not necessarily default)
       | that I could switch to without having to manually remap
       | everything, I'd be so glad to use them.
        
         | grondo4 wrote:
         | They do? Or at least the Jetbrains IDE I use the most
         | (IntelliJ) will ask you the first time you start it up if you
         | want to use VS code keybinds
        
           | 90s_dev wrote:
           | Wow you're right. To be fair it was about 9-10 years since I
           | last tried it, so either it didn't have that back then, or I
           | forgot that it did.
        
         | leovander wrote:
         | They do have those options out of the box. I immediately switch
         | them over to the VSCode bindings when on a new work machine.
         | 
         | https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/configuring-keyboard-and...
        
           | nsonha wrote:
           | they have a VS keybinding option out of the box, but the
           | VSCode one is also available on the Marketplace
        
         | xp84 wrote:
         | They do. There are a ton of keybinding sets to choose from
         | right there in the options. Heck, when i first started, I chose
         | Textmate bindings!
        
       | OrvalWintermute wrote:
       | I've been a quite happy Jetbrains All Products Pack subscriber
       | for several years now.
        
       | perrygeo wrote:
       | As good as LSP and other tooling has gotten recently, there are
       | some C++ projects that just need a proprietary IDE for proper
       | code navigation and completion. A lot of times my choice is a)
       | spend 3 hours debugging why neovim's LSP is putting squiggly
       | lines everywhere or b) just fire up CLion.
        
       | gh0stcat wrote:
       | This is cool, I briefly looked at using this to work on an unreal
       | project, does anyone have any experience with using CLion with
       | unreal? Is Rider or VScode still ideal?
        
       | chpatrick wrote:
       | I used to use CLion but switched to VS Code with the clangd
       | extension. It's by far the best and snappiest C++ coding
       | experience I've had.
        
       | mcflubbins wrote:
       | Great, but how about letting me have my paid, licensed Rust rover
       | open on two PCs simultaneously?
       | 
       | I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I
       | forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop
       | (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get
       | an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it
       | closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it
       | does this because I still had an old window open. Really
       | unnecessary...
        
         | seatac76 wrote:
         | I just bought the annual license for all IDEs did not know this
         | was a restriction that's a bummer. Surely they can do some
         | pattern analysis to determine which systems belong to a single
         | license.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | It's not a restriction for personal licenses.
           | 
           | EDIT: Or if you a corporate license and have the same OS
           | username on both computers.
        
             | seatac76 wrote:
             | Ahh I see. Thanks
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
           | gb/articles/206544319-Can-...
           | 
           | https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
           | us/articles/207...
           | 
           | For personal licenses it's a non-issue. For commercial, use
           | the same username on both computers. If you have floating
           | licenses, you need multiple licenses.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | You just have a corporate license: https://intellij-
         | support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207...
         | 
         | And you have different operating system usernames on both
         | computers. It says if you have the same OS username on both
         | you'll be fine.
         | 
         | This works fine on my personal license with different
         | usernames.
        
       | hiatus wrote:
       | Can anyone comment how this compares to Dev-C++?
        
       | demarq wrote:
       | This is a good move, more people will unwittingly be running a
       | trial of the product.
       | 
       | I suspect there's a whole lot of devs who've never experienced
       | paid IDEs vs VsCode. Plus the community is about to grow insane.
       | 
       | Interested to see what happens
        
       | the__alchemist wrote:
       | These are so interesting. From my perspective using PyCharm and
       | RustRover: By far the best code editors, in terms of
       | introspection and refactoring. The only ones I've used that model
       | my _projects_ correctly; VsCode and Sublime etc make it feel like
       | I 'm editing _files_ , where are IMO the wrong abstraction.
       | 
       | I experience major performance problems. They periodically bring
       | my 9950 CPU to a crawl, or freeze, requiring a force-kill.
       | (RustRover more so than PyCharm, but both are guilty). Memory
       | hogs. (Feels like they leak memory). This is consistent behavior
       | over the years, across a range of project styles.
       | 
       | I put up with the performance problems because of my first point!
       | 
       | The interesting/amusing part to me: My experiences do not seem
       | wholly consistent with other users: Many users seem to find these
       | IDEs heavy, but don't experience the freezes, crashes, or memory
       | leaks. And many (most?) people claim VsCode is fine for managing
       | multi-file projects. I don't know what to think!
        
         | winrid wrote:
         | That's insane, I use webstorm, pycharm, and Intellij, sometimes
         | all at the same time, on a mobile 8th gen i7, it doesn't lock
         | up. The single thread passmark score is literally half your
         | cpu! :D
        
           | winrid wrote:
           | Although I guess none of those projects are more than 150k
           | loc.
        
         | ackfoobar wrote:
         | > ... RustRover: By far the best code editors ...
         | 
         | I'm using RustRover. It's pretty lame compared to the IntelliJ
         | experience. "Find usages" does not separate test code and
         | application code; "copy reference" gets me the file name and
         | line number instead of the fully qualified name.
         | 
         | I'd probably use vscode/cursor fully if I weren't so used to
         | the JetBrains environment.
        
         | trallnag wrote:
         | Are you experiencing these problems on your personal device or
         | is it a corporate provided one full of scanners? IntelliJ is
         | definitely slower on my work laptop compared to my private
         | desktop. Might also be due to the larger project size and heavy
         | usage of Spring, though
        
           | the__alchemist wrote:
           | Various personal devices over time.
        
           | sensanaty wrote:
           | I have my work project loaded on my home PC, and to be fair
           | it's a beast of a PC, but still it's _insane_ how much power
           | is wasted on the work macbook from the stupid MDM software
           | running on it. It feels _blazing_ fast on my PC, and the
           | slowness is unbearable sometimes on the work laptop.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | I really wish JetBrains released its terminal as a standalone
       | product. It's one of the best.
        
       | giancarlostoro wrote:
       | One thing I wish JetBrains would explore is building a fully
       | native NON-JRE text editor that is a direct competitor to Sublime
       | Text, but has a rich plugin API. I would love to see their take
       | on a Sublime like editor. Atom and VS Code were the only serious
       | Sublime Text competitors for a while, but now VS Code has gotten
       | insanely bloated over the years, and also Atom is defunct
       | unfortunately.
       | 
       | I would love to see them build a fully native editor with their
       | decades of knowledge.
        
         | hiccuphippo wrote:
         | They have Fleet which was supposed to be a competitor to
         | VSCode. AFAIK it's written in Kotlin so still JRE (unless they
         | are able to compile it to native?).
         | 
         | Maybe Zed would be more interesting for you.
        
       | taylorallred wrote:
       | I love jetbrains IDE for all sorts of features (their git tools
       | like diff checker are unmatched imo). I've been wanting to use
       | them for C++ for a while now specifically because I find that
       | many LSP solutions are not that great. Looking forward to using
       | the non-commercial version of clion!
        
       | Artoooooor wrote:
       | Wow! Thank you for sharing, I would miss this otherwise.
        
       | geophile wrote:
       | This is a love letter to JetBrains.
       | 
       | I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just
       | worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could
       | build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten
       | IDEs that were so bad I discarded them immediately. Even early
       | on, their refactorings were usually flawless. While I think I
       | found one screwup, they were so good that they changed the way I
       | coded. I could easily and reliably do refactorings that were
       | otherwise pretty time-consuming and error-prone. I have continued
       | using their products: mostly PyCharm now, and occasionally CLion.
       | 
       | Each new release improves the UI, and occasionally adds features
       | that I find useful, and many that I don't. I suspect that I'm not
       | alone in using a very tiny portion of the features they offer.
       | How they can keep up with all the languages, and libraries, and
       | frameworks is beyond me, but they seem to do it.
       | 
       | Their support has always been excellent. I once (v4?) complained
       | that refactorings did not extend into configurations. E.g., if I
       | rename a class Foo to Bar, then the runtime configuration running
       | Foo didn't reflect the change. I reported it, and found a fix in
       | the next release. Email with technical questions or bug reports
       | is always handled promptly and thoughtfully.
       | 
       | They have always provided absolutely fantastic products for free.
       | Yes, you gave up some features, but the free versions are really
       | useful. I'm retired now, but continue to pay their licensing fees
       | every year, for my hobby usage, because it's worth it, and they
       | earn it. And the licensing is not onerous to use. What I really
       | like is that you don't have to be on the internet to use their
       | products, just for the license check. I wish all licensed
       | products did that.
       | 
       | And beyond all this: _They haven 't sold out._ They are one of
       | the very, very few for-profit tech companies that have maintained
       | a stellar level of product breadth, depth, quality, and support
       | for such a long period of time. I'm sure they could have cashed
       | in, sold to IBM and the product would have just rotted away,
       | (sorry, IBM, but you know it's true). I can only think of one
       | product that is comparable in this way, and that's Postgres.
       | 
       | Thank you, JetBrains, you have Figured It Out.
        
       | Xss3 wrote:
       | Just bought it last week. Oops.
        
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