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Rider is now free for non-commercial use

jetbrains.com

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Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#181

This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022... I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.

What does "noncommercial use" mean in this context though? These are tools for work - is the idea that students can use them for free and then will start paying once they finish school?

It means you can use them as a hobbiest or a student. For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project.

If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay.

Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial success.

I am a Rider fan so this is exciting.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#183
post #170

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community. As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better. Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages. - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

RustRover (Rust ide) is also now free for non commercial use

Oh. Very cool. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#184

Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode? I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?

I believe the JetBrains equivalent of VSCode is Fleet, which is already free. In other words, their code editor.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#185

Rider is much better and faster than Visual Studio, and it's worth every penny. Making it free is a great move.

I think it’s a bit worrisome that Microsoft can give away VS Code for free because they subsidize it in other ways, but JetBrains - a small software shop - clearly is being forced into this position. Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.

I suspect JB know most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses (I‘m guessing), so this shouldn‘t cut their bottom line significantly, while simultaneously giving them a foot in the door of potential new customers. Get them hooked for private / OS projects, then sell them commercial licenses.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#186

As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.

I think some of Rider is written in C# vs all Java for IDEA. Could that be it?

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#187

WebStorm too https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

Oh that's awesome!

I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs - the way it understands code relieves so much mental overhead when tracing through my code, finding usages, refactoring, etc. It's one of the rare pieces of software I actually enjoy using. I just can't justify the cost for personal use for the amount I use it, and the fact that I've never really monetized a side project.

Super happy they're making this move. I think there's good logic to getting people hooked with free personal use so they can convince their company to buy licenses for everyone at work.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#188
post #78

For someone who just got into game development on Mac, this is very interesting. I'd never heard of this IDE before. Will give it a try.

You won’t regret it. They’re basically the industry leaders in IDEs. They also make JetBrains Mono, a fantastic monospace coding font.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Rider license for a while but just let it lapse. I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way). I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.

What fan boy nonsense is this? The VSC support for c# is miles behind visual studio. Rider isn’t as good either, but it’s certainly better than VSC. Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base? This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC. It’s a great editor; but not for c#. The benefit of using it i…

"What fan boy nonsense is this?" Good way to start a VS fanboy post.

Personally, I have written APIs in C# from scratch to production entirely in VSC; your assertion that "It’s a great editor; but not for c#" is literally false in my lived experience.

Rider is also good. And since I run Linux, VS took itself out of my consideration entirely.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#190
post #176
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Unreal as well - I've used Rider on multiple AAA Unreal titles that include custom engine edits and it is significantly faster than VS at loading massive projects. The integration is great and allows for seeing blueprint classes and references in the C++ project. I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot o…

I had no idea Rider supported C++. My impression was that it is for .NET only. How does it compare to CLion?

Yeah they originally had a separate branch "Rider Unreal" but now it's part of Rider, C++ support seems mostly the same across both, except for project support. If IIRC Rider doesn't support CMake projects, but it does support vsproj projects, so if you generate vs files from cmake it'll load fine, but probably better to use CLion for any non-UE projects if using C++. I guess they're seeing it as .NET/GameDev IDE.

Honestly I don't know why there are so many almost identical IDEs.

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