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IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

blog.jetbrains.com

101–110 of 141 posts

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#101

Interesting that all of the discussion is rambling about IntelliJ in general (e.g. Is it slow? Is it better than this other IDE? Ermagherd, Java sucks! Etc). Nothing about the actual specific topic, which is that one of the most prominent development tools in the Java ecosystem now expects the current Java version to be installed. Expecting the current version might sound mundane to a Rubyist or Node person (and it m…

Honest question: why is backward compatibility an issue for development machines? It's an IDE, right, so you will still be able to edit the project that is backwards-compatible with 1.4 with it?

Intellij can be configured to target older versions of the Java language (so it will basically error if you use newer language constructs than the ones you've set) but I can imagine that it might be very difficult for you to capture quirks of java 1.x if you're using java 1.y. Difficult enough that most developers would just decide they haven't time for the trouble and install an old, unsupported, and insecure version of the jvm on their work machine.

EDIT: To be clear, those quirks would exist on your production deployment running java 1.x which is why they may be important to emulate.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#102
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To speed up IntelliJ products, immediately open Settings -> Directories and exclude all unnecessary folders. Otherwise a crawler background process will indexes every file, and it consumes a lot of CPU and IO resources.

In one extreme example, my project was a scraper that scraped in 80k images or so, and IntelliJ was essentially unusable until I did this (16 gig of ram, SSD, i7 quad core etc), and completely fine afterwards. So if anyone is having performance problems, please do check this out.

what kind of scraping project was it?

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#103

Interesting that all of the discussion is rambling about IntelliJ in general (e.g. Is it slow? Is it better than this other IDE? Ermagherd, Java sucks! Etc). Nothing about the actual specific topic, which is that one of the most prominent development tools in the Java ecosystem now expects the current Java version to be installed. Expecting the current version might sound mundane to a Rubyist or Node person (and it m…

Honest question: why is backward compatibility an issue for development machines? It's an IDE, right, so you will still be able to edit the project that is backwards-compatible with 1.4 with it?

[deleted]

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#104
post #23
post #2

I really like the IntelliJ products (especially PHPStorm with the Symfony2 plugins, PyCharm, etc) but you really need a 'beefy' computer to run it properly. SSDs are a must.

To speed up IntelliJ products, immediately open Settings -> Directories and exclude all unnecessary folders. Otherwise a crawler background process will indexes every file, and it consumes a lot of CPU and IO resources.

In my RubyMine, it's named "Project Structure".

Excluding the log directory is extra important. It's empty when you create the project, but will probably keep growing and gradually slow everything down the more you work.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#106

Interesting that all of the discussion is rambling about IntelliJ in general (e.g. Is it slow? Is it better than this other IDE? Ermagherd, Java sucks! Etc). Nothing about the actual specific topic, which is that one of the most prominent development tools in the Java ecosystem now expects the current Java version to be installed. Expecting the current version might sound mundane to a Rubyist or Node person (and it m…

"Java 8 was SUPPOSED to an even bigger shift than Java 5" No, it's not, Java 8 is mostly lambdas and unlike generics which requires coordinate effort between the client side and the API side, lambdas are just syntactic sugar at client side and plain old interfaces at API side.

Because of that, Java 8 is supposed to be a smaller shift than Java 5.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#107
I've given it a whirl, but it looks like their handling of non-English/Qwerty keyboard layouts is as broken as ever:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-63779

It's disappointing, as I like the tool and would like to adopt it for every-day development.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#108

Call me old, but I still use eclipse even for android programming (using the ADT plugin). Every IDE has pros/cons, and both eclipse and intellij have their shares, but if you consider the big picture, they mostly even out. In fact, I would rather argue that the features on which intellij rules are of superficial nature and have more to do with a "nice feel" (such as more friendly code-completion or better looking gra…

Most Intellij IDEA users (including myself) are former Eclipse users. Could I go back to Eclipse? Sure, but I wouldn't be as productive with it as I am using Intellij. I found myself fighting the UI and configuration way more with Eclipse than I have with Intellij. This might not be an issue if using 1-2 programming languages, but if using more than that, it gets pretty tedious in Eclipse. Used Eclipse for 3-4 years…

i have the exact same experience. Used to use vim as my editor for doing coding excercises for classes - switched to eclipse for bigger class projects. Started working, and got a chance to try out intellij (when it was at intellij 7!), and was blown away at the order of magitude productivity increase (which, i had to put some effort learning a lot of the shortcut keys, but was well worth it).

Now, when i use eclipse (e.g., conducting a job interview with a candidate), i find it's UI strange, lack of ease of navigation really off putting.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#109

Interesting that all of the discussion is rambling about IntelliJ in general (e.g. Is it slow? Is it better than this other IDE? Ermagherd, Java sucks! Etc). Nothing about the actual specific topic, which is that one of the most prominent development tools in the Java ecosystem now expects the current Java version to be installed. Expecting the current version might sound mundane to a Rubyist or Node person (and it m…

> Maybe it's Oracle releasing new Java versions every two years now, and being more aggressive about end-of-life'ing the prior versions?

This is a big part of it.

If you want support for older JDKs, you have to pay Red Hat for OpenJDK support. Which isn't even "real" Java, in the eyes of many companies.

Add in the clamour of major libraries and platforms pushing everyone to go to Java 8 so they can slash great chunks of boilerplate code and it's a smooth ride downhill.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8

#110
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse is not what I would call the paramount of performance.

In my experience, Eclipse performs far better than IntelliJ and the UI is more responsive. Probably because Eclipse uses SWT instead of Swing (which has another benefits as well, like better font rendering in OS X).

IntelliJ IDEA 2015 actually improved their font rendering to look as good as with SWT – I have no idea how they did it, though.
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