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Ask HN: High performance, low latency IDE suggestions

by boronine on 1/26/24, 12:46 PM with 11 comments

I'm an IntelliJ user on M2 Mac, I've been testing VS Code out of curiosity and found it a bit slow, even simple things like "go to definition" have annoying latency.

Out of pure curiosity, is there any alternative to JetBrains in this regard? I am aware of LSP, but skeptical that it can ever be fast due to its client-server design.

Any programming language is fine as long as it has static types.

  • by meekins on 1/28/24, 11:47 AM

    My current primary workstation is very low spec and old compared to a M2 Mac. On that machine Sublime Text is very performant and provides an awesome code writing experience through LSP. I use it as a daily driver with TypeScript, Go and Dart. I try out IntelliJ (or Android Studio) and VSCode occasionally to check out how they are these days but they feel sluggish in comparison.

    If you need more IDE-like features like running tests and builds or managing for example mobile phone emulators from the editor it requires more fiddling with configuration and plugins but is doable.

  • by RGBCube on 1/26/24, 2:09 PM

    Zed just went OSS, and it is really fast. Check it out: https://zed.dev/

  • by solardev on 1/26/24, 5:47 PM

    Do you find IntelliJ slow? Once mine finishes indexing a project, the rest of the time it feels lighting fast. M2 Max here, 32GB. I think I allocated 16GB to IntelliJ (manually, in the help menu I think). I usually have Webstorm and RubyMine running side by side (for frontend and backend projects) along with a bunch of other apps and browser windows and they all feel really snappy. Hmm. Are your projects huge? Or does Java have a lot more overhead?

    Jetbrains also offers hosted instances if you want to see if that's any faster... https://www.jetbrains.com/space/features/dev-environments.ht...

    (I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that network latency at 30-100ms shouldn't be as noticeable as a slow computer, if that's really the issue)

  • by kwant_kiddo on 1/26/24, 11:00 PM

    I have not found a better 'true' IDE experience than JetBrains. Once it has done it's thing, it works pretty good. If your projects are big like a C++ codebase +2mil LOC then well the latency is going to suffer.

    If you count VSCode as an IDE then I would suggest neovim with an LSP and a fuzzy finder. It is the fastest/best dev setup I have experienced for most things.

    If you are very latency sensitive I am afraid an IDE/'smart'-editor may not be for you. Then I again would consider some lightweight editor that has fuzzy search and no intellisense.

  • by sgt on 1/26/24, 12:49 PM

    I don't think the client/server design of LSP is a limiting factor itself. That said, nothing seems to beat JetBrains these days so I am also on that wagon.

  • by zerr on 1/26/24, 7:55 PM

    For Java, the fastest editor/IDE used to be JCreator. At that time, the only Java IDE made with native/C++ tech. Sadly, it is abandoned.

  • by uaas on 1/27/24, 12:18 AM

    I am satisfied with my various language specific neovim configs. There’s some upfront cost, though.