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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#381

Post by tomjen3 »

drKarl wrote: post #144
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

That is actually a misconception. You may have this mental classification of Java as a slow language if you looked at its performance 20 years ago. Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C (or definitely assembler) might be faster in some workloads, but Java is definitely very very fast nowadays. It uses a lot of memory because of the way Garbage Collection works, but it is…

Java is fast enough for most things, but try working with an array of a million objects in C++ vs Java and you will see the difference.

In Java you will have to deal with an array with a million pointers to a million objects and in C++ you will deal with a sequential segment of memory that is a million times the size of your object - and mostly in your CPUs cache. That alone will be much, much faster.

But you can't do that in Java at all.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#382

Post by jcelerier »

drKarl wrote: post #144
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

That is actually a misconception. You may have this mental classification of Java as a slow language if you looked at its performance 20 years ago. Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C (or definitely assembler) might be faster in some workloads, but Java is definitely very very fast nowadays. It uses a lot of memory because of the way Garbage Collection works, but it is…

> Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with C++.

yet every time I try a Jetbrains IDE every action seems to take 10x the time to be processed than it takes in QtCreator

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#383

Post by hbn »

powvans wrote: post #221
malux85 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - JetBrains is one of those companies where their products speak for themselves, and I happily pay every year. Absolutely money well spent.

Yes! My JetBrains Ultimate renews every November and I get a little giddy in anticipation of paying them for another year. It’s just such an amazing value. JetBrains is so good it’s like finding money on the sidewalk.

If you REALLY want to treat yourself, let me give you an address to send some bitcoin to!

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#384

Post by tomjen3 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #153
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

TBF, Jetbrains IDEs do feel sluggish at least on macOS compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my mid-2014 13" MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI performance though (the latter is probably more likely).

I have a MBP of about the same vintage, but I retired it from hard tasks a couple years ago. It is a 6 year old machine, we can't expect it to perform well.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#385

Post by bigmattystyles »

GordonS wrote: post #343
tuyguntn wrote: post #19

if JetBrains people are reading this, I want to say THANK YOU! You saved lots of developer time with IDE, then Kotlin language. I use Golang, Python and Database IDEs, and they are really nice and time saving, can't imagine how much time you guys saved to Java developers where everything is reflection based annotations and deep level of abstract class/interface implementations. (last time when I worked with Java in V…

JetBrains is one of my favourite ever companies! A few years back I switched from Visual Studio + ReSharper to Rider, and haven't looked back - it's such a fantastic, fully-featured, stable product. I have a personal license that let's me use ReSharper, Rider, dotCover, dotMemory (love this!), dotTrace. Some of the best money I've ever spent, and I happily renew year on year. I also love the pricing model that reduce…

How is the perf / mem usage in Rider vs VS w/ Resharper?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#386

Post by syspec »

I love JetBrains IDE's...

Huge fan, have the all products subscription for years and use multiple of their IDE's simultanously and try to convince anyone who will listen why these are just better IDEs, which is why they should pay for it.

However, please please, bring back the old "local changes" view. It is a huge part of the workflow when coding. I don't know of a single person who thought it needed to be changed, but everyone i've discussed it with wishes it was returned to the previous style.

For the record, you can revert it (for now) by going to: Settings > Version Control > Commit > "Use non-modal commit interface"

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#387

Post by chokma »

flohofwoe wrote: post #153
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

TBF, Jetbrains IDEs do feel sluggish at least on macOS compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my mid-2014 13" MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI performance though (the latter is probably more likely).

Performance got worse on Linux, too. A year ago, JavaDoc would be displayed instantly. Now I have to wait 5-8 seconds for the IDE to display information about a class / method. It may be a kernel related bug from what I have found on the net, but it seems strange that some operations are still fast, while others take several seconds (like opening a menu).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#389

Post by theptip »

sharpneli wrote: post #340
theptip wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a blind spot, it's explicitly part of their company's long-term strategy; Musk's plan from the beginning was to start with a luxury-tier offering (Roadster), and gradually work their way down the price-points as they achieved greater economies of scale. Musk wrote about this way back in the day (2006): https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... > Almost any new technology initially ha…

Good point. So they simply were not able to ramp up faster than it took for the existing manufacturers to start catching up and leveraging their scale better.

Yep, it's a classic "new market entrant is racing to become the incumbent before the incumbent(s) can copy their innovations" situation.

It's a good illustration of why software is such a different paradigm than traditional physical economies; VCs can pour funding into a software company and since the marginal costs are close to zero, the innovator can blitz-scale and take over the market before the incumbent has time to react. However when "scaling" means building global logistics infrastructure, including factories for batteries and factories for cars, it's a lot harder to get the drop on the incumbents.

I think the GP's comment is spot on though, if Tesla fails to win this race, they will still have been the driving force in bringing EV adoption forward by 5-10 years (perhaps more), which is an incredible achievement.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#390

Post by bleair »

vonmoltke wrote: post #192
ajdegol wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan and user of PyCharm for many years, but we all know that when my fan starts going and the laptop wants to take off, we can guarantee that PyCharm is indexing ;)

PyCharm is fine for me. IntelliJ, on the other hand, will periodically freeze my work Macbook when trying to reindex parts of our monorepo[1]. Makes me wish I wasn't forced to use a laptop... or a monorepo. [1] Note, just a handful of top-level targets comprising 2%-3% of the whole repo. Indexing the entire monorepo at once is a non-starter.

The freezes might be caused by IntelliJ's jvm running out of memory. Go to the help menu and then Memory Settings (it's not in the normal settings)
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