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Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

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Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#61

Post by masklinn »

hashkb wrote: post #6

LSP is a huge deal and ought to allow all kinds of new editing tools to empower users with the kind of things we used to get scoffed at by Visual Studio users for living without. Vim is now as "full featured" as VSC and I have some bet winnings to collect. Edit: corrected autocorrect

> the kind of things we used to get scoffed at by Visual Studio users for living without.

Needing to buy thirdparty addons to get basic refactoring tools? Because for a very long time that was the VS experience, it was incredibly bare-bones compared to the equivalent Java IDEs.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#63

Post by beyondcompute »

I am wondering a bit what is meant here by “disruption”. As I see the situation, some people seem to believe that as professionals we don’t necessarily have to use “the best tools available” and if you can save a little by getting “almost as good (after some tinkering)” it’s more than acceptable.

My view is that if “a real IDE” (I use quotes as this is subjective and said in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek manner) gives you even 3% performance boost, it’s well worth paying 100 euro per year especially if you are making tens of thousands using it.

Overall though this “IDEA vs VS Code” situation is interesting because it reveals something about cultural situation in the developers’ community.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#64

Post by specialp »

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…

Besides Typescript, I haven't seen any language server do better in syntax completion and introspection better than the JetBrains equivalent. They probably don't want to work on it because 1. If they write their own they can make it work to exactly what they need, and 2. They would probably not leverage as much working on the OSS version as they'd lose by open sourcing and doing the bulk of the work on what makes them money. That might sound cold but it is not unreasonable.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#65

Post by brzozowski »

The author frames this as a contest between two architectures: either spend a lot of effort building custom developer tools, or repurpose the compiler as a server for multiple clients. Both approaches have their tradeoffs: the first, as the author mentions, violates DRY [1]. The second violates the Unix philosophy [2].

However, there is a third way. Both developer tools and compilers can be seen as special cases of a much simpler and more general pattern known as a graph database [3, 4, 5].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyyJyB_Ssc

[4]: https://petevilter.me/post/datalog-typechecking/

[5]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.03082.pdf

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#66

Post by azeirah »

mythz wrote: post #30

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/Debuggi…

Part of it feels like it comes from a different development philosophy.

Vscode is a "text editor" or a "code editor". Usually this means that it's fairly lightweight, supports every language under the sun, is highly configurable and extensible, but doesn't have a lot of very in-depth features, and also partially relies on third-party extensions for deeper functionality.

Jetbrains on the other hand works on IDEs built for one specific language explicitly. Consider CLion for C, it's only a couple of years old!

They put a lot of resources into supporting a language and all its relevant workflows. Phpstorm for instance has built-in support for three different standalone code quality checkers, composer (package manager) support, deep language understanding with highlighting, warning, errors, refactorings, generators etc, doc comments, code formatting, support for different testing frameworks, a built-in debugger, etcetcetc...

While that's great, you shouldn't go edit python code in Phpstorm. It supports syntax highlighting and maybe a couple of other small features, but that's it!

In short, code editors usually cast a really wide net with a lot of configurability and extensibility, while (jetbrains) IDEs tend to go really deep on a single language or workflow, with less extensibility, and deep configurability within the supported language itself.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#67

Post by kvakva »

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…

At this point, I don't think VSCode competes with Atom.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#68

Post by rubyist5eva »

VS Code is fantastic and I'd rather use it over something like Eclipse, but as a very happy jetbrains recurring subscriber, when my subscription comes up for renewal I can't think of anything that gives me so much productivity for such a relative pittance of cash.

I still had it installed for quick edits until I found out about Panic's Nova and then uninstalled it and paid for that - the look and feel, and responsiveness of a native application just can't be beat.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#69

Post by leetcrew »

mythz wrote: post #30

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/Debuggi…

I think that sounds about right. I see vs code as a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type of tool. if I want to try something in a new language or just edit some text real quick (I find vs code has better than average support for weird text encodings) but keep a familiar ui, I go with vs code. if I'm going to be doing some more in-depth work, I'll spend the time to learn a purpose-built tool. I mostly write c++ for windows, and I find vs code can't really compete with its big brother (bloated as it is) here.
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