Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

blog.jetbrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 276 posts

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#91

Post by NoahKAndrews »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #75
hadrien01 wrote: post #16

I still don't understand where Jetbrains is going with Fleet. Is it a platform to prototype ideas for their IDEs? Is their long-term goal to replace their IDEs with Fleet? Is it just a standalone product? So far, it seems like they're very slowly recreating their IDEs from scratch in Fleet while continuing development on the IntelliJ Platform and related IDEs, doing twice as much work for nothing.

In my opinion it seems like an experimental competitor to VS Code while also giving them a way to dog food new Java-based UI frameworks (KMP, Compose).

Except it doesn't use Compose, it uses its own new thing that sounds kind of similar, but predates Compose Desktop.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#92

Post by switch007 »

codingwagie wrote: post #17

Personal opinion is that JetBrains products have gone down hill the last few years. Tons of memory leaks and performance issues. They are also way behind on the AI front, borderline obsolete in some areas. This is coming from someone who has used jetbrains daily for over a decade

Agreed. Used to be excited about new versions now it's "great, what's going to be slow / broken" now

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#94

Post by TiredOfLife »

ashu1461 wrote: post #74

I wish Jet brains would give AI features for free for some time, Github co pilot will be incompatible with fleet for some time and even with other legacy jetbrain IDEs like webstorm / pycharm it does not work very well. They always release features for vs code first and then webstorm follows.

Jetbrains ides have free local only full line completion

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#95

Post by pantulis »

hadrien01 wrote: post #16

I still don't understand where Jetbrains is going with Fleet. Is it a platform to prototype ideas for their IDEs? Is their long-term goal to replace their IDEs with Fleet? Is it just a standalone product? So far, it seems like they're very slowly recreating their IDEs from scratch in Fleet while continuing development on the IntelliJ Platform and related IDEs, doing twice as much work for nothing.

> I still don't understand where Jetbrains is going with Fleet. Is it a platform to prototype ideas for their IDEs? Is their long-term goal to replace their IDEs with Fleet? Is it just a standalone product?

They don't necessarily need to exactly know what it is, perhaps is just Jetbrains hedging their bets.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#96

Post by jillesvangurp »

Fleet was a strategy to counter vs code. As such it did not work that well. It's not feature complete enough to consider as an intellij alternative and a bit too different for vs code users to take serious. So, easy to see why they are pulling the plug on that.

Vs Code of course is the wider ecosystem of plugin compatible editors based on the vs codium platform. This includes a lot of the recent AI editors, and several non vs codium based editors that can integrate the plugins (e.g. vi).

The core issue is that Fleet is outside of that ecosystem and doesn't have the community or user adoption to get that fixed. It's a chicken egg problem that's hard to fix. It's being pulled two directions. On one hand you have existing intellij users who use that to do most of their development. And on the other hand you have people that are using vs code and depend on a lot of its plugins. Fleet is a bit of an empty room for both groups of users. None of my more serious projects load correctly in fleet. I've tried it a few times and it's just missing too much stuff for me to take it seriously. And I bet VS Code users would be equally unhappy.

Fixing that would involve bringing over the majority of features from intellij and vs code, and recreating those in fleet. Which of course wasn't really happening given that it's being positioned as a closed source platform.

IMHO keeping Fleet closed source was the mistake that doomed the whole effort from day 1. In short, they were on their own and not really able to pull that off. Google is understandably focusing on supporting intellij, which at least has an open source core. Providing an open source core for intellij in 2009 was the key enabler that allowed them to move from eclipse to intellij. Google embraded it in 2013. Some of the older people here might remember that Android Studio started out on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse support ended in 2015. Open source is what made that transition possible.

Which of course raises the question what the whole point of a closed source Fleet was given that users, plugin developers, and major partners like Google are all focus on the open source ecosystem around intellij. And the rest of the ecosystem is vs code based.

Answer: there is none. Hence this foregone conclusion.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#97

Post by pjmlp »

nmfisher wrote: post #81
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only problem with jetbrains UI is that it's slow. Night and day difference using even vscode, let alone vim, sublime, helix, zed, etc. I tolerate it because the functionality it brings, but I find myself actually writing code in something faster. And I don't see fleet improving on this in a meaningful way - it's basically a competitor to vscode, which I don't use for the same reasons I won't use fleet. There is a…

Exactly this. Every time I revisit a Jetbrains product, I uninstall it within 5 minutes. It doesn't matter how great the features are, it's just sluggish. People can rag on Electron apps all they like, but VSCode on modern hardware is very snappy. Jetbrains is a noticeable downgrade.

Just use Eclipse or Netbeans instead, I never liked InteliJ for Java development due to its continuous indexing, errors have to be explicilty asked for, and the ten finger combos for shortcuts.

VSCode is anyway running either Netbeans or Eclipse headless for its Java support, better use the real deal.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#98

Post by pjmlp »

malkia wrote: post #9
arwineap wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In jetbrains paradigm you should install IDEA and install python plugin, go plugin, etc. You only have to do it once That should get you within 90%+ use cases

I think there was no C++ (ahem native) debugger in IDEA... but I'll check again, could be wrong really...

Meanwhile Eclipse and Netbeans have been supporting mixed language development, and JNI debugging, for the last two decades.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#99

Post by jeroenhd »

ashu1461 wrote: post #74

I wish Jet brains would give AI features for free for some time, Github co pilot will be incompatible with fleet for some time and even with other legacy jetbrain IDEs like webstorm / pycharm it does not work very well. They always release features for vs code first and then webstorm follows.

The CPU-based one-line AI generated code is available without a subscription. I'd love for Jetbrains to make a slightly-upgraded version that runs on the GPU instead, but the single-line suggestions work fine for me.

I don't think it makes sense for something as compute intense as cloud LLM code generation to be made available for free. I do wish I'd have the ability to connect IntelliJ to a local LLM instance without having to bother with custom plugins or Ollama, though. They're supposedly working on a locally-hosted LLM integration, but that'll be locked behind a subscription as well.

Re: JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

#100

Post by MortyWaves »

solardev wrote: post #28
hadrien01 wrote: post #16

I still don't understand where Jetbrains is going with Fleet. Is it a platform to prototype ideas for their IDEs? Is their long-term goal to replace their IDEs with Fleet? Is it just a standalone product? So far, it seems like they're very slowly recreating their IDEs from scratch in Fleet while continuing development on the IntelliJ Platform and related IDEs, doing twice as much work for nothing.

I think Fleet's their hopeful answer to VSCode. IntelliJ is powerful, but so, so messy, with a convoluted UI from the 90s/2000s. Even the simplified one is much klunklier than VSCode, especially for everyday/every-hour tasks like NPM scripts, debugging, etc. Every essential function is hidden in tiny competing side panels triggered by some obscure icon in a different part of the screen. I love and use Jetbrains IDEs…

I’ve been trying DataGrip for SQL stuff after Azure Data Studio (a closed source fork of VS Code) was recently deprecated.

It has all the same UI problems I remember of their other IDEs like WebStorm. Clunky and weird looking, and that’s coming from someone that appreciates generally Windows 9x style controls and palette, JetBrains just can’t get it right.

As a side note one of the advertised features of DataGrip is its AI/LLM features which I thought was kind of cool after dealing with a terribly designed and legacy database; LLMs have really helped with refactoring.

So once I got a license for DataGrip and then opened it the AI tool was no where to be seen. I had to go read the docs page online to find out I have to install the extension myself. Weird.

The advertised AI feature is… behind another paywall with a seven day trial. Hang on, I just got DataGrip for its “included” AI support and you want to charge me for it anyway?

I’m glad I got the license for free via their OSS support, but would I have bothered if I knew one of the main features is actually a separate paid feature? Probably not.

Post reply on HN