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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#411

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

I used to share the "Java is bad" mindset, but now I realize Java (at least the JVM) is actually really good.

The main issues people assume with Java are that it has slow runtime and it's verbose.

But the JVM is actually rather fast. Especially compared to JavaScript and Python, which aren't even compiled (and which I still agree with the "it's crap" hivemind). Anything that needs real performance you should be outsourcing to C/C++ FFI calls, and as long as you do that your Java app's performance should be OK. And a key cause of Java's big slowdown are checks e.g. for null-pointers and casts, which are much better than C++/Rust's approach of being unsafe-by-default.

Java is verbose, but JetBrain's awesome IDE single-handedly fixes this problem - writing POJOs and using long-named functions and classes is fast, and IntelliJ will hide excess boilerplate so that even reading code is easier. And if verbosity is still too much of an issue, there are JVM alternatives like Kotlin.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#412
post #4

I don’t get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.

If they lose control and starts putting profit up front as their primary objective than developer spirits, I'm sure many will move to vs code and vs code may speed up its development with more eyes and hands.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the first time I am reading these allegations. Do you have sources backing up your claim or is it just expected to be “common knowledge”?

In Russia anyone rich enough is either part of FSB or gets an offer one can't refuse (for example, see Sysoev/NGINX). Owners of the company are not dead.

What happened with the nginx owner?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#414
On Earth 2 where Jetbrains took VC money there's an ambitious product manager pushing his team to finish a built-in music player (along with 2 gigs of royalty-free lofi beats) as the issue logs backs up with angry customer complaints about poor language server integrations, crashing, and general slowness.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#415

Has anybody tried to make Vim act as close as a JetBrains IDE? Some people code in Vim and think they're ace but that's just so far behind no matter how you tweak it.

Vim is a way of editing. I use IdeaVim inside jetbrains IDEs and it is awesome. Many popular vim plugins are also supported.

I still try to keep vim as close as possible as an open source alternative. Thankfully, a lot of editor features have been abstracted enough that the same software runs in vscode and terminal vim. e.g. ternjs for intelligent autocomplete in JavaScript, and the vim keybindings itself. Still, open source code intelligence isn't as good as the proprietary intelligence of jetbrains, so I bring vim inside jetbrains.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#416
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 ;)

Sure there are some places to improve. My only complaint is with the remote features, now with covid. I want to seamlessly work as if I was sitting in the office (I can ssh to the machine). My current setup is to sshfs mount my remote code, install a conda env on my laptop mirroring the office one, and execute things in a terminal window. PyCharm then becomes an editor, autocompleter, refactoring tool, code navigatio…

There is stuff like projector that lets you make a remote machine a dev machine that does all the building, indexing, etc. Have a beefy 80 core machine be your dev machine while you work on your lightweight laptop, or have it live in the data center so debugging connections are not so 'remote', etc.

https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-docker

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#417

as a PHP developer, PhpStorm is fantastic, and knowing that JetBrains hired one of the most active and prominent PHP Core developers to let him continue working on the language is fantastic. Happy to pay for these apps because of that.

Wish I could figure out how to set up Xdebug properly on MacOs. Most PHPStorm and Xdebug tutorials are geared for Vagrant set ups but not straight forward localhost on main machine.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#418
Heh, their app was the only IDE I went in and added support for when it came to porting macOS keybinds over to Windows and Linux lol. I had no idea they have grown to be so popular and are fully owned still by the original founders.

I have support for VSCode and Sublime Text 3 as well of course, but they're not IDEs.

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/blob/master/windows/kinto....

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Russia anyone rich enough is either part of FSB or gets an offer one can't refuse (for example, see Sysoev/NGINX). Owners of the company are not dead.

What happened with the nginx owner?

Igor Sysoev (not owner, that would be F5 Networks, but CTO of NGINX, Inc.) was detained, accepted the deal and was released.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Rider is way snappier. With VS, I'm very used to slowdowns and even total freezes for several seconds (which people like to attribute to ReSharper, but IME they happen plenty even without ReSharper) - for a big, full-features IDE, once Rider has started, it feels really snappy, and puts to bed the long-held beliefs that Java is slow.

Just opened a big solution in both VS and Rider to confirm:

  - VS was really laggy after opening, pinning all 8 Xeon E3 cores for 2 full minutes!
  - VS memory sitting at 1.3GB, plus another 0.9GB for ReSharper
  - Rider took 22 seconds to load the solution, then used a bit of CPU for 30s (but was totally responsive in that period)
  - Rider memory sitting at 1.1GB
So assuming you use ReSharper, Rider uses a lot less memory, otherwise it's above the same. But still, for me Rider is way more responsive for editing, debugging, everything. And more stable too.
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