Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#21

Post by mwint » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

voidfunc wrote: post #3

I don’t really see IntelliJ and VSCode as competitors. VSCode competes with atom and other full-featured text editors (vim, emacs) ... its got great adoption amongst the newer generation of programmers that think those editors are old school and user hostile. VSCodes Java, Python, and Golang support is miles behind IntelliJ. FWIW, on my team at Microsoft where we write a lot of Go, theres a 50/50 split between Intell…

I'm a current MS intern, curious what work ya'll are doing in Go. Would you be up for a call sometime?

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#22

Post by jart » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #5

HN deserve better content than this, while the topic is interesting there are too much errors, unadjusted logical quantifiers and omissions to make this biased writing worth a read.

It's also posted by some anonymous throwaway account that was registered on GitHub three days ago. JetBrains deserves more respect than this. They're not threatened. They're a rising star. They're making tons of money when the rest of the industry thought there wasn't any money to be had in tools anymore. I love them because speaking as a long time Emacs user, JetBrains makes the only IDEs I've seen that simulates Emacs well enough that I can feel comfortable using it. Java is a real pleasure to work with thanks to them and I don't see that changing anytime soon. If they had support for make and assembler then I'd use it while working on cosmopolitan libc too.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#23

Post by domano » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

Language support in VSCode for Go breaks in unexpected ways after every update of Go, VSCode or any plugin involved. gopls has not helped at all so far.

Golang or IntelliJ with the Go plugin just work. I have been trying to use Code instead of IDEA for 3 years and it is just not worth it. VSCode startup also is not as fast anymore, so that USP is gone as well.

Debugging features are not even comparable, the difference is day and night.

I tried fixing it again and again but never in my whole journey has there been a moment where everything just works, just as Goland did since it became stable.

It is cheaper to use IDEA Ultimate instead of wasting a few minutes every day fighting with my IDE.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#24

Post by whynotminot » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #18

whynotminot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So VSCode is very, very good for TypeScript. Hell, I'm pretty sure VSCode itself is written in TypeScript! But that does not carry over to all languages. When working on web apps with a Java backend, I still prefer Idea because it's better for Java and close enough for TypeScript so it comes out ahead over all.

> But that does not carry over to all languages. It does. All languages are basically the same. They parse to ASTs that you can manipulate programmatically. If those ASTs are strongly typed, you can safely perform refractors. What makes IntelliJ good is the base framework JetBrains uses, the same one they use in WebStorm, PyCharm, etc. VSCode is that same thing: an adaptable base and I’m sure making it on par for Jav…

> All languages are basically the same.

Well that settles that, then.

Thanks for playing folks wrap up the site! We’re done here.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#25

Post by meddlepal » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #10

voidfunc wrote: post #3

I don’t really see IntelliJ and VSCode as competitors. VSCode competes with atom and other full-featured text editors (vim, emacs) ... its got great adoption amongst the newer generation of programmers that think those editors are old school and user hostile. VSCodes Java, Python, and Golang support is miles behind IntelliJ. FWIW, on my team at Microsoft where we write a lot of Go, theres a 50/50 split between Intell…

Interesting. I have used IntelliJ for Java for as long as I can remember and can't imagine using anything else. For JS and Go I use VSCode. I wonder if it's just what I started with and am used to. I've tried to use Intellij a couple of times for Go, but end up back on VSCode.

I dont know how you’re productive with VS Code and Go... I watch my coworkers live code with it sometimes and they are struggling. The lang server crashes constantly and stuff like autoimports or code complete barely works. I sometimes want to scream while watching them struggle.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#26

Post by pirocks » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

charrondev wrote: post #9

matsemann wrote: post #2

Most of this post is just speculation like " I seriously doubt it will work well in an average cafe though " without much substance. Either test it or report on it, or at least discuss its shortcomings based on some technical merits. And frankly I don't care how well it works on "spotty café wifi". If the wifi sucks I wouldn't sit there and work anyway. As for the language server protocol, nothing stops IDEA from doi…

One of the things that baffles me is the rust-Lang support. Rust-lang has an official dual-licensed MIT/Apache language server protocol implementation (RLS) under active development. In my view it’s currently a better experience than the custom IntelliJ one. Instead of collaborating though I see IntelliJ continuing on the path of their custom implementation. Every week RLS gives an update on their progress and so doe…

A few years ago I contributed to an Intellij plugin with significantly less resources than the rust one. What became clear there was that external tools are glitchy, laggy, frequently crash, and don't quite match Intellij's model of things, native Intellij support will likely always be better.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#27

Post by maple3142 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

In my opinion, one killer feature of VSCode is the ability to connect to WSL, remote server and Docker container. As someone mainly developing on WSL2, I use this feature everyday. I only use Idea when I need to use Java or Kotlin, because its language support is really good.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#28

Post by skohan » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

ssijak wrote: post #11

For typed languages like Java and Kotlin there is really no competition. IntelliJ is just clearly above every other IDE. For dynamic languages advantages are less clear, but still there. Every time I tried to use VsCode for longer periods of time on my JS/TS projects, I would stumble on many small bugs and problems, usually with extensions that I would loose the nerve and just get back to Webstorm.

It shouldn't be surprising, right? Didn't Kotlin start as a JetBrains project?

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#29

Post by zappo2938 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

Until four months ago I used PHPStorm although I haven't typed a line of PHP code in at least 4 years. Since all my coding is with TypeScript I decided to switch to VSCode and not renew my Idea subscription.

The only feature I miss is the local history. It is nice to be able to aggressively hash out code to solve a complicated problem and revert to the state 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 20 minutes ago or at least look at the diff.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#30

Post by mythz » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

I used to think VS Code was going to be a threat to JetBrains IDEs considering how fast its iterative development was (thanks in large part to the productivity of JS + Web renderer) but its never seems to quite be able to reach the feature-set, polish & intelligence of JetBrains IDEs.

Every IDE function appears to be better implemented in JetBrains, whether it's Code Analysis, Refactoring, Navigation, Running/Debugging, Running Tests, adding new files, git integration or contextual functionality like adding package references etc. Everything is just better in JetBrains.

I see VS Code as an ubiquitous smart editor platform with zillions of plugins that's half way between a glorified text editor and an IDE which I use a lot for quick dev changes, quickly searching a folder, front-end UI development, trying out new languages or writing docs. But if I have to start a long dev session I turn to JetBrains which I find far more productive.