It's wild to me that Jetbrains has been making so many top-tier IDEs, languages, runtimes and other developer products for 25 years now and is valued at maybe $5B, meanwhile we have months-old "pre-revenue" startups releasing AI coding wrappers and raising money or being bought out for twice that.
csallen · 18h ago
Some relevant and timeless facts:
- Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)
- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."
- In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories.
- It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
gizmo686 · 17h ago
When analyzing the value of a young, pre revenue company, one of the things you want to look it is how established comparable companies are valued. For AI coding assistants, the field is too young to do that directly. However, they are competing in the space of "developer productivity tool for writing code". That space is an established market that is currently dominated by IDEs.
Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger space does not compute.
Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a feature in their established products.
All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space look a lot like a bubble.
csallen · 16h ago
This analysis framework you're providing would've missed YouTube (pre-revenue; no incumbent successes; crowded with competitors like Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc). It would've missed Instagram (pre-revenue; no massive photo-focused incumbents; tons of competing photo sharing apps in the App Store at the time; no moat against a big social app adding filters). It probably. would've missed WhatsApp. And many others.
Which suggests that your framework is lacking.
Here's where:
1. You're neglecting to look at the differences between the fast-rising stars and the comparable incumbents, and instead you're assuming that the incumbents automatically represent a ceiling. In this particular case, JetBrains obviously isn't the most ambitious company on the planet, and isn't focused on hyper growth. There are plenty of avenues for AI IDEs to grow and expand their revenue that have yet to be explored.
2. You're overestimating the importance of concrete moats. Google had no concrete moat either. Just because people can switch easily doesn't mean they necessarily will.
3. These companies aren't pre-revenue. I believe JetBrains is making something like $400-$500 million dollars a year, after 25 years. Cursor is at half of that in just 2 years. Windsurf is also doing big numbers.
4. Related to #3, you're underestimating growth trajectories.
5. You're leaving out the context. Companies that can afford to make $3B acquisitions (a) have tremendous war chests, and (b) have extremely ambitious goals. They're not looking to build the next JetBrains, they're looking to join the pantheon of $1T companies. Achieving massive 10x or 100x or 1000x growth as an investor/owner requires making asymmetrical bets -- bets where if you lose you're still okay, but if you win, you win big.
DrScientist · 1h ago
I believe the key thing you are missing here is that there is probably an expectation that AI based coding tools will be more mass market, rather than traditional developer market.
ie it's a mistake to estimate the potential upside by looking at the size of the current developer market.
As you move you're coding tools towards a less technical customer base - there are two synergistic effects - your potential customer base is much much larger, and they are simultaneously less technically competent on average ( and so less likely to build their own tools if you charge too much ).
Whether those assumptions are true - time will tell - but I definitely see more people thinking software development is now accessible to them.
sgc · 17h ago
Reading a bit between the lines, it seems like the buyers either 1) think that ai assisted coding will get good enough that a lot more people will be doing it - that in the future companies in other fields will spend on it for their employees much the way they are paying for general ai assistants now. Or 2) more likely, they think they will get good enough to completely replace programmers, and the current coding assistant's role is mainly to gather information from developers to eventually replace them completely, by selling a spinoff product at a much higher price. They think they need spyware, and coding assistants are the best version available.
echelon · 18h ago
This should be nailed to the wall.
Almost everyone here is providing business value in service of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
immibis · 15h ago
It's not a waste of emotional energy to consider how to convert a company from the $5-billion slow and steady type to the $10-billion instant acquisition type. Indeed the premise of our economic system is that maximum value is created when people continually strive to maximize the values of their companies.
rf15 · 7h ago
Yes, and what an unstable and cannibalistic system that is! That's why some of us prefer not to sell/go public, instead opting for stable albeit less income. As another comment said, I don't need a third house or car collection. My one house is plenty, and I'm already in a position most of the country can only dream about.
immibis · 2m ago
It doesn't matter whether you like the system or not. It is the system, and you will be punished for not following it. In this case, by an opportunity cost of 5 billion dollars and several years. If you think you can change the system, try it and see what happens.
vel0city · 16h ago
"If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x or 1000xer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue; you're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money."
- Russ Hanneman
adeptima · 15h ago
this guy .....
Aurornis · 18h ago
The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.
They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.
I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.
throwaway2037 · 1h ago
> With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
IntelliJ (and its siblings) are like the Airbus A380 of IDEs, and I am fine with it.
serial_dev · 17h ago
I am using their free product, IntelliJ CE (community edition). I simply couldn’t get used to VS code and its AI derivatives.
Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays for every engineers’ Cursor usage, can’t imagine how much it could cost, but they don’t have any encouraged integration with JetBrains… so while JetBrains products are good, I’m wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype pushing them to higher valuations
spullara · 15h ago
Augment has a great extension for jetbrains products. Much better than their AI tools (and better than cursor for large code bases).
0x1ceb00da · 18h ago
They have such a nice product! But every release comes with almost the same number of bugfixes and new bugs. I wish it was a more stable product and they were more cautious about adding new features. Every new feature comes with the risk of adding more bugs.
throwaway2037 · 1h ago
I don't agree with your assessment, but I want to encourage you to raise bug tickets on YouTrack (their answer to Jira). In the last 10 years, I have had more than 100 (no joke!) of my bug tickets fixed by JetBrains. If you write a good description with a min-repro, they will fix it.
> I wish it was a more stable product
Can you give a specific example of a bug that you encountered?
simion314 · 16h ago
You have the option to not update in place. Download the new version and keep the old one too, then test the new version, if they broke your workflow go back to the old version until the bugs are fixed.
luckylion · 18h ago
I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to fight for a day to get rid of".
Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
bandoti · 18h ago
Honestly this is why I use emacs. Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.
My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse).
That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context.
Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.
0points · 2h ago
> Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.
Since I dont need updates every 5 minutes, I disable the update checker if on Windows, and just don't update my software stack all of the time as it inconveniences me.
bdamm · 12h ago
It doesn't usually take a too much code - usually around 20,000 lines - where I personally am not able to think my way through debugging complex failures. Tombstoning code only gets you so far (and is a useful skill). Being able to step through code and jump around symbol references is a huge help for my limited powers.
If you have fully memorized all of Linux and GLibC and all your supporting libraries then yeah, I guess you don't need powerful tools.
empthought · 8h ago
Emacs steps through code and jumps around symbol references, though.
raincole · 17h ago
> The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.
Which one?
Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
hiccuphippo · 13h ago
Funny, what sold me on AI was watching Andreas Kling work on SerenityOS/LadyBird using CLion and it giving some impressive suggestions.
betterThanTexas · 16h ago
Seems to work fine for me, I haven't noticed it getting in my way any more than any other assistant.
vital · 11h ago
Junie. I was immediately impressed.
killerstorm · 17h ago
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost 10 years, and I'm not impressed.
Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...
AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..
People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
rf15 · 7h ago
There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds, and your AI problem... maybe it was really early right after release? Either way, contact their support.
And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.
I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.
Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.
Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.
kokada · 17m ago
> There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds
To be fair with OP, I had a similar experience in the previous company. Sometimes after bumping a dependency or something, even if you asked IntelliJ to "Reload All Gradle Projects" something wouldn't work and I needed to restart the IDE. Not saying it was common, but it did happen. This was a Kotlin codebase.
Now working in a company using Scala, I had a few cases where IntelliJ failed to resolve a dependency correctly so it was saying that the class I just created didn't exist (this was in shared library and two different dependencies pulled it, but we did pin the dependency directly and sbt was building it correctly, it was only IntelliJ that was becoming confused). Cleaning up the build sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but even when it worked it would go back after a while. Eventually we updated all dependencies in all projects and it now always works, but it was painful for a while.
foepys · 17h ago
Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.
Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
homebrewer · 20h ago
Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result: JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long before that.
hbn · 20h ago
But their founders ran off with a fat paycheck so the system worked as intended
asadm · 18h ago
Life is like that, some are more blessed than others in some metric. You gotta make your own lemonade.
nsonha · 20h ago
They're a great company but geopolitics is working against them.
Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud, that's lazy.
devmor · 19h ago
I believe that's why the comment author put "AI" in quotation marks. There's a massive amount of fraud around "AI" right now, as there always is in the startup scene with a hot new technology.
nsonha · 18h ago
there is still a distinction as the field itself is not a hoax, which I can't say the same about NFT.
Unless you prefer to think of the AI field as representable by a bunch of Indians actually behind software, as the sibling (insincerely and again lazily) reduces it to.
immibis · 15h ago
Engineers that want to run startups need to stop denouncing fields they don't like as "fraud". Some people made more money than you. Learn from them and it could be you next time.
bitwize · 16h ago
Where am I reducing an entire field to anything? If one truthfully says there's a bunch of companies doing this or that, that associate AI with fraud, that's not the same as reducing an entire field to fraud.
echelon · 18h ago
> geopolitics is working against them.
Do most people even know they're a Russian company? Do businesses decide not to invest for that reason?
rsynnott · 18h ago
They’re _not_; the founders are Russian but it was founded in the Czech Republic and no longer has Russian operations or sells to Russia.
mananaysiempre · 17h ago
Nobody in Russia who valued their business chose to incorporate it—or at least its parent company—in Russia. After Yukos, the writing was on the wall. (And now, of course, everybody who values their business takes pains to point out their chosen country of incorporation as though it wasn’t originally just a saner jurisdiction. As you’ve shown, everybody does it because it works.) JetBrains specifically did employ a fair number of both Russians and Ukrainians, though, and unlike Yandex or mobile carriers, was not prominent enough to be forced to split immediately after 2014, so it was inevitable they would have to move out of Russia (and they did so pretty gracefully).
momocowcow · 17h ago
There are no native Czech speakers in their management. It's a similar story as the Yandex guys going off to Nebius Group in the Netherlands after the invasion.
rsynnott · 44m ago
Sure, but they're not a Russian legal entity and as far as I can see never have been (unlike Yandex). So, to the point that their being a Russian entity might be a problem for investors, it's moot, as they are not one.
shuuzo · 17h ago
Do you know how many founders in Silicon Valley are not native English speakers? What are you even talking about?
grues-dinner · 13h ago
Presumably, if you wanted to stick the boot in on Russia, a decent way to do that is to encourage smart, economically productive Russians to incorporate outside Russia and attract as many young capable Russians to come with them as possible.
bitwize · 19h ago
It's not us lumping AI together with fraud. It's the companies employing, for example, Actually Indians to do things they claim are done by machine. Or the ones marketing ChatGPT with various agentic hookups as a replacement for developers. Or...
bakugo · 16h ago
The hundreds of AI startups desperately trying to convince management that they can replace entire teams of skilled humans with AI are, by definition, a scam. Maybe a different type of scam than crypto rugpullers, but still a scam.
immibis · 15h ago
In capitalism, a scam is when investors lose money because you broke a law. Which law is being broken here?
grues-dinner · 13h ago
No, that's fraud. A scam can be legal. Timeshares, "Winter Wonderlands", many extended warranties, planned obsolescence, weaselly technically-correct advertising (overpromising to investors is sort of this) pretty much everything hidden in ToC screeds, some MLM schemes, basically all cryptocurrency (and a lot of normal finance to be fair), etc etc.
Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
immibis · 56s ago
Oh, well the whole economic system is a scam then, so as long as you're stuck inside a scam system, you succeed in the system by scamming.
riku_iki · 20h ago
I (and many others) use LLM for coding tasks multiple times a day, its very unlikely they will go the way of NFTs.
lolinder · 19h ago
Most "AI" startups aren't building coding tools, and the utility of this tech goes down dramatically in industries that are less legible on the open internet than software is.
riku_iki · 18h ago
> industries that are less legible on the open internet
I think there will be also wave of private LLMs fine-tuned on corporate data, and it will be also good tools.
Eggpants · 19h ago
Then your “code” is riddled with bugs. Coding by Statistics will only end in tears.
riku_iki · 19h ago
I didn't say I blindly trust generated code, it needs to be read through and covered by tests, but tasks like generate boilerplate code for some lib I never used before and which would take time to locate and read through documentation now are 10x faster.
There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete working code.
asdsadasdasd123 · 18h ago
This is just cope. We've rolled out cursor company wide with no noticeable uptick in bugs.
giancarlostoro · 18h ago
What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object) and produce native and highly performant binaries.
It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday.
I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
ternaryoperator · 18h ago
Programming languages are high-cost, low-revenue beasts. When Kotlin was first released, JB was hoping it would replace Java in the enterprise. And as the sole providers of Kotlin tools, they'd have a greatly expanded market.
Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it internally, etc.
We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
raincole · 17h ago
The irony is that there are a lot of "XYZ Native" solution, such as Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Xaramin, etc. But somehow only React Native, something based on a web framework, seems to reach the critical mass.
cempaka · 2h ago
What did you mean by "inline classes" here? My only understanding of that term applies to something like what Java is still developing for Valhalla but has not delivered yet, whereas Kotlin is arguably a little farther along with its own feature with that exact name.
neonsunset · 14h ago
There are fundamental restrictions where NativeAOT will never work or be desirable. For example, runtime-compiled regex patterns or any other feature which relies on emitting IL at runtime and creating new members or even assembles and then loading them. Similar applies to compiled expression trees - they are supported in NativeAOT but in the form of falling back onto interpreting them, which has worse performance. Or unbound reflection with patterns that cannot be statically proven and/or analyzed.
Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are hard constraints - a correctly working expression like 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code which does exactly this.
The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI, EF Core has some compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a solved problem although you may need to use a different API.
At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go) and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which specifically exploit it but is also a performance optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations, and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases, usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).
The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower stems from other sources of performance overhead that are typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which have "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation itself. There are technicalities like certain calls have to be indirect in order to support patching the callee address, or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers/callees may be constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
lvass · 20h ago
This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company. Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time preference which makes everything turn to shit.
karolist · 15h ago
I gave them a year of subscriptions before cancelling recently, the devcontainer implementation in their Ultimate versions is laughably bad, bugs upon bugs and tickets where their support staff just bounces it up with "still no fix" messages and customers are finding workarounds, i.e. downgrading docker installs.
Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to fix something in the
integrated shell and giving up, but sadly forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back to nvim here, not for me.
symlinkk · 13h ago
+1, the Remote SSH is horrible. Takes forever to connect and is extremely laggy once you have connected. Feels like they’re practically streaming video of the UI back to you instead of VSCode’s Remote SSH which feels indistinguishable from running locally.
cempaka · 2h ago
Yeah I'm a big fan of the JetBrains IDEs but I tried it out a few days ago and couldn't even get it to stay connected. Gave up after reading a few recent forum posts about how much trouble people are still having with the feature (which does have a big purple "Beta" label in the IDE at least).
pacetherace · 18h ago
That's pretty much the comparison between Tesla and old-time car manufacturers. Most people who are trading Tesla stock don't even look at other car stocks.
xnx · 12h ago
This does seem very unfair, but don't believe any of the numbers being used to value these OpenAI acquisitions. If it's not cash, it's just a lottery ticket.
SJC_Hacker · 20h ago
The thought is if AI turns out to be what its billed as, you won't need IDEs.
It would be like investing in a horse-and-buggy whip manufacturers around the turn of the century.
nine_k · 18h ago
The fun thing is that JetBrains do have AI, and it's pretty good.
They can't invest in AI the amounts that Microsoft can, of course.
falleng0d · 16h ago
You can use Copilot and a bunch of new Agents such as augment and firebender which are very good.
In the worst case you’ll still be able to use AI tooling similar or equal to what you have in VS code. Even Windsurf has an JetBrains plugin.
jimbokun · 15h ago
Well in that case you won’t need tools like Cursor either.
Just vibe code away and never look at the source it’s generating.
melenaboija · 15h ago
Well, all this is only a small fraction of the two trillions Nvidia has gained in valuation since 2022.
scialex · 20h ago
They are hoping that those companies will become like synopsys and able to sell per seat subscriptions to their software for huge amounts.
That or they just drank the Kool aid
colechristensen · 20h ago
Nobody is going to acquire JetBrains at a crazy premium to remove a competitor or to stay a competitor themselves. OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Meta will.
The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies fighting over startups.
Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing this fad much at all.
nwatson · 19h ago
Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant, seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models).
Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs.
So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al
paxys · 19h ago
> they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be
Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from the conversation no matter how good your product is.
skeeter2020 · 17h ago
They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment over the years. They make good stuff and their audience (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with an alternative approach?
disgruntledphd2 · 19h ago
See further: Aider.
Applejinx · 16h ago
Good. I use their stuff or at least I'm starting to use it more, and I don't want them acquired and enshittified.
renewiltord · 19h ago
I've had a Jetbrains license for years. I barely use their stuff now. Cursor is much less capable IDE but better coding environment. At first I'd use them both on the same thing but now it's all Cursor.
senordevnyc · 17h ago
Exact same here. I love PHPStorm for Laravel dev, but I’ve barely used it in months. Meanwhile I’m paying $100+ per month to Cursor for subscription + premium model usage. And honestly I kinda hate Cursor as an editor / IDE. I really hope Junie is good enough to switch back, but I won’t give up integrated AI agentic coding in my editor if it’s not.
trallnag · 17h ago
Is it really better than VS Code with GitHub Copilot though? I kinda doubt it
senordevnyc · 6h ago
They’re not even in the same category.
ToucanLoucan · 21h ago
Because the products being good isn't what investors look for. Investors look for good business. And, assuming they can actually make it work, putting together AI coding apps that get software "engineers" to outsource enough of their thinking to a machine that they can then jack the price through the ceiling on and make bank via enterprise billing is incredibly good business.
However that is a load bearing if.
emsign · 19h ago
That's called dumb money, because greed lowers the IQ.
tekknik · 6h ago
Maybe because I don’t want multiple editors and/or subscriptions. Give me one that does it all.
keepamovin · 20h ago
Aw shit, I guess I should stop doing actual products and just go where the fad is. That's what the "smart money" does, I guess. I mean, isn't it smart to pursue maximal profit? Max payoff - you can use it to fund other things!!!
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 19h ago
You're being sarcastic but yes. If your intention is to take large sums of cash from investors and run off with a fat check then that is exactly what you should do.
keepamovin · 19h ago
No I'm actually not being sarcastic. I know it might sound like that - it's hard to grok tone from text and I'm not particularly concerned. But I'm seriously considering it, I mean -- the goal of most startups is to solve (as PG puts it) "the money problem". So what am I doing building products, when I could be chasing these fads and possibly banking huge? I mean, that's smart, right?
I'm not being sarcastic at all. I feel I need to reiterate that because you got it wrong.
nine_k · 17h ago
If enough of the market participants act stupid, or at least in predictably irrational ways, it may be profitable to capitalize on that behavior.
If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some of the money from it.
keepamovin · 10h ago
I think there’s that side to it, it may be correct to swoop in and profit, if you can outsmart them.
But then there’s another side where the fad has real value and the people investing have money because they’re smart and they recognize the value. And you have to be to make value in the fad.
But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 16h ago
Some people might say there is more to life than making money but if you just want to hopefully get some naive investors to give you a large pile of money for your vaporware then go for it, it's where the money is.
keepamovin · 10h ago
Thanks, I appreciate your answer. Not sure it’s me tho. I guess another side I’d there’s probably real value in the fad, too. On some level, if you can figure that out.
All these people with money didn’t all get it by being stupid or fddy or vaporware so they’re responding to signals of value and their responses are reliable indicators in general.
OtomotO · 21h ago
The power of hype.
The same was true for Web3, Crypto, Machine Learning...
SJC_Hacker · 20h ago
Was crypto really hype? BTC has been around for almost 15 years now, and has been on a bumpy rise up to multiples of its value
paxys · 20h ago
The only good investment in crypto has been to buy and hold BTC. So while it has worked well as an asset (like gold or paintings or baseball cards), the crypto industry itself – thousands of startups in the space, all the altcoins, blockchains, smart contracts, web3, NFTs, ICOs, DeFi, "stable" coins – have all either fizzled out or just been outright fraud.
dgfitz · 20h ago
Ever heard that saying about finding the sucker at a poker table?
raincole · 15h ago
I did. The first time I heard people describe crypto as such, Bitcoin was at $5000.
dgfitz · 12h ago
The first time I bought bitcoin it was under a dollar a coin. When I realized it actually had zero real value I got out.
What actual value does bitcoin have? As an example, gold can be used to make high fidelity cabling.
int_19h · 4h ago
If price of gold was according to its "actual value", it wouldn't be $3300/oz right now. Nor would anyone hold it if they expected its price to ever get down to such "actual value". Bitcoin really isn't any different in that regard - it has value because people are willing to trade it. Although it does have practical uses, as well - black markets, for example.
FergusArgyll · 19h ago
I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure the vast majority of it is but USDC alone market cap is north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC. You can't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200 Billion - more than the value of OpenAI
No comments yet
insane_dreamer · 15h ago
Not to mention that JetBrains is implementing AI agents into their current products -- if I'm already a user of IntelliJ, PyCharm or CLion, etc., why would I switch to Cursor or Windsurf?
dismalaf · 19h ago
It's the difference between bootstrapped companies and VC backed or public ones. Bootstrapped companies don't have any growth expectations whereas the funded ones do and are priced based entirely on speculation.
atemerev · 21h ago
Well, that's the difference between being in Silicon Valley and not being there.
oytis · 20h ago
Isn't this criterion just a bit irrational for people entrusted with investing billions of dollars?
atemerev · 20h ago
People entrusted with investing billions of dollars are very much not rational, as we can observe every day.
Additionally, network effects and experience input and VC concentration in Silicon Valley are very real and very rational. For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already?
This might change in the near future, but I doubt it.
hyperhopper · 19h ago
> For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already?
Very false. A lot of the best in the world have no intention of ever living in silicon valley. In my circles people dread even a week long trip there.
duped · 20h ago
People love to crap on VC but it's a great transfer of wealth from the rich that have so much money they can give it to other people to gamble for them by paying people to drop out of school to build things that will never make a return on investment. \s
disgruntledphd2 · 19h ago
From pension funds and insurance companies, you mean?
varispeed · 20h ago
Are these IDEs really top tier though? I found them slow and laggy. Switching to even something like VS Code was night and day difference.
I have PTSD from accidentally opening CLion or PyCharm. Fans starts spinning and there is dozens of seconds wait to close this thing down.
not_kurt_godel · 20h ago
As someone with decades of software engineering under my belt, my opinion is they are the best IDEs out there by a comfortable margin. It's possible the issue you're encountering when accidentally opening them is due to index updates which would occur disproportionately often on startup for people who otherwise never use them. Other than that, performance is more than satisfactory 90+% of the time in my experience.
Maxatar · 19h ago
That's just it. In my company there are basically three sets of developers. The very experienced ones prefer vim/emacs. The experienced ones tend to like these more established IDEs, and the younger developers absolutely hate these IDEs and find them to be slow and bloated.
I can't really comment on whether they are good or not since from my perspective I see people who are productive and unproductive using both of these tools, so to me it just looks like mostly a matter of preference. But newer developers don't seem to like these established IDEs and see them as you said: big, slow and laggy.
varispeed · 18h ago
I work fast and I have ADD. If I have to wait for the tool to do something and it breaks my flow, I am out. It is simple as that.
Some people like slow IDEs, because that gives them time to have a cuppa or browse Reddit when the "index is updating". I have no time for that.
koakuma-chan · 19h ago
Have you tried Fleet? It's a next generation IDE from JetBrains and some of it is written in Rust.
NoahKAndrews · 18h ago
It seems like JetBrains may be giving up on Fleet. Honestly though, I think their established IDEs are good enough to be worth a few bugs and performance issues.
simion314 · 16h ago
Intellij is an IDE where VS Code is a bit mroe then a text editor.
When you open a project for the first time it takes time because it is indexed , maybe it will index your dependencies if you did not bother to disable that.
IWhen i open a file /project from a collegue that uses VS Code is filled with errors and warnings because their VS code text editor is not actually understanding the code they are editing.
symlinkk · 13h ago
People that say this are completely out of touch. You know there are VSCode extensions for Java (made by Oracle and Redhat themselves), right? Once you install that you get Intellisense, debugging, etc. Same with C#, Python, etc.
simion314 · 5h ago
I know that, once but once you install that you will not be able to praise VS Code performance anymore, you just get an inferior Intellij IDE in all dimensions.
insane_dreamer · 15h ago
Can't speak for CLion, but for heavy python development, PyCharm is much better than anything else out there that I have tried.
tomjen3 · 20h ago
I have stopped using Jetbrains to switch to Windsurf. Their "mere wrapper" is that good.
regularjack · 19h ago
JetBrains AI now does essentially the same thing as Windsurf and Cursor. My prediction: JeBrains IDEs will be around in 5 years, Windsurf and Cursor won't.
senordevnyc · 17h ago
I hope you mean Junie, because their old AI assistant is shit. And Junie isn’t available for all the JetBrains IDEs yet.
But overall I hope you’re right, I really want great agentic coding in PHPStorm.
tomjen3 · 17h ago
True, in the sense that VIM and Emacs both edit files.
TiredOfLife · 21h ago
Cursor is 2 and Windsurf is 3 years old.
miroljub · 20h ago
Those are not even IDEs. They are just forks of a fork.
TiredOfLife · 19h ago
Which ide VS Code is a fork of?
paxys · 19h ago
Not a direct fork but VS Code was built on the foundation of Atom, and heavily inspired by it. People generally consider VS Code to be the successor of Atom, especially after Microsoft bought out the creator of Atom/Electron (Github) and shut down the project.
TiredOfLife · 13h ago
VS Code is built on the foundation of Monaco. And when you run it in a browser it has nothing common with Atom. And on desktop the only thing from Atom is the runtime Atom shell now called Electron and it is essentially Chrome with some glue for integrating with OS.
make3 · 19h ago
and Atom is an electron clone of Sublime Text
shagie · 16h ago
The history is slightly different...
Atom was an editor made by GitHub that competed with Sublime.
Microsoft built several key tools on top of Electron (VSCode being the relevant one here) and became very interested in maintaining control of it... and so bought GitHub when it was up for sale.
> Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we’ve decided to sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
> This is a tough goodbye. It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
make3 · 6h ago
It remains that Sublime existed way before Atom, and that it was a Sublime clone
make3 · 19h ago
Cursor is still great though, and was a real step forward, despite what a lot of people here will say
hbn · 22h ago
I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use. I've never made any money off of my occasional side projects, so I could never justify the cost to pay for a license when I may go an entire year without using. But I really love their editors - their key mappings are an extension of me at this point, it's so smart about figuring out how the code works and letting you find usages or refactor without thinking, and their git UI is basically the only way I find git tolerable.
I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!
vishnugupta · 18h ago
They have this terrific plan where if you buy yearly subscription you will get the major version free for life even after you stop paying after one year.
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered it. Been using it since then for like 3-4 years now.
dardeaup · 20h ago
Not all of them. I believe it's IntelliJ, Rider, CLion and maybe 1 or 2 others. GoLand for example is not yet free for non-commercial use.
NoahKAndrews · 14h ago
It's CLion, Rider, RustRover, and WebStorm, IntelliJ is not on the list.
So far they haven't muddied the waters for any versions that already had free Community Editions (IntelliJ and PyCharm). The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
Defletter · 14h ago
> The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have the Educational licence when I was in university. What was there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have any the wiser?
NoahKAndrews · 13h ago
As far as I know the commercial use restriction is pretty much entirely the honor system, with some risk of a lawsuit if they found out somehow.
rob74 · 21h ago
> I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use.
All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion, Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use. Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted licenses for certain users (e.g. students).
lolinder · 19h ago
"Has been opening" is the present perfect continuous tense [0], which describes something that started in the past and is still ongoing. In TFA JetBrains says explicitly that this is a process that they intend to continue assuming it goes well.
I have been using PyCharm, IDEA and Android Studio for free for a while now. I'm not a student or any special category of user. I think you only get "core" features for free but they sure still among the most featureful IDEs that I have used.
I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-commercial license. But so far they've been consistently opening them up one-by-one.
NoahKAndrews · 14h ago
It'll be interesting to see what they do for PyCharm and IntelliJ, which already have free Community Editions. Long term, I doubt they'll want to have two types of free version that restrict usage in completely different ways, but if they kill the Community Editions, anyone using them for commercial use will have to either build from source (hopefully the end of community editions wouldn't mean the end of the open source parts), start paying, or switch to an alternative.
I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's a lot of ways it could go.
jackwilsdon · 21h ago
There are community editions of IDEA and PyCharm which are free for commercial use too.
wing-_-nuts · 21h ago
Right, but goland, and importantly the go plugin for intellij are both not free, which is a bummer
I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten IDEs that were so bad I discarded them immediately. Even early on, their refactorings were usually flawless. While I think I found one screwup, they were so good that they changed the way I coded. I could easily and reliably do refactorings that were otherwise pretty time-consuming and error-prone. I have continued using their products: mostly PyCharm now, and occasionally CLion.
Each new release improves the UI, and occasionally adds features that I find useful, and many that I don't. I suspect that I'm not alone in using a very tiny portion of the features they offer. How they can keep up with all the languages, and libraries, and frameworks is beyond me, but they seem to do it.
Their support has always been excellent. I once (v4?) complained that refactorings did not extend into configurations. E.g., if I rename a class Foo to Bar, then the runtime configuration running Foo didn't reflect the change. I reported it, and found a fix in the next release. Email with technical questions or bug reports is always handled promptly and thoughtfully.
They have always provided absolutely fantastic products for free. Yes, you gave up some features, but the free versions are really useful. I'm retired now, but continue to pay their licensing fees every year, for my hobby usage, because it's worth it, and they earn it. And the licensing is not onerous to use. What I really like is that you don't have to be on the internet to use their products, just for the license check. I wish all licensed products did that.
And beyond all this: They haven't sold out. They are one of the very, very few for-profit tech companies that have maintained a stellar level of product breadth, depth, quality, and support for such a long period of time. I'm sure they could have cashed in, sold to IBM and the product would have just rotted away, (sorry, IBM, but you know it's true). I can only think of one product that is comparable in this way, and that's Postgres.
Thank you, JetBrains, you have Figured It Out.
mdaniel · 8h ago
I was expecting you to end with "and don't squander the amazing track record of developer goodwill you have accumulated by forcing the stupid-ass 'New UI' on us, or telling us that we're committing code wrong, or somehow suddenly trying to go 'All AI' or whatever"
I'll be straight: for me personally there is no replacement, and I'll just patch the "unsupported" Commit Like a Sane Person plugin[1] indefinitely if I have to, but ... come on, don't strain our relationship like that
These are so interesting. From my perspective using PyCharm and RustRover: By far the best code editors, in terms of introspection and refactoring. The only ones I've used that model my projects correctly; VsCode and Sublime etc make it feel like I'm editing files, where are IMO the wrong abstraction.
I experience major performance problems. They periodically bring my 9950 CPU to a crawl, or freeze, requiring a force-kill. (RustRover more so than PyCharm, but both are guilty). Memory hogs. (Feels like they leak memory). This is consistent behavior over the years, across a range of project styles.
I put up with the performance problems because of my first point!
The interesting/amusing part to me: My experiences do not seem wholly consistent with other users: Many users seem to find these IDEs heavy, but don't experience the freezes, crashes, or memory leaks. And many (most?) people claim VsCode is fine for managing multi-file projects. I don't know what to think!
ackfoobar · 17h ago
> ... RustRover: By far the best code editors ...
I'm using RustRover. It's pretty lame compared to the IntelliJ experience. "Find usages" does not separate test code and application code; "copy reference" gets me the file name and line number instead of the fully qualified name.
I'd probably use vscode/cursor fully if I weren't so used to the JetBrains environment.
winrid · 18h ago
That's insane, I use webstorm, pycharm, and Intellij, sometimes all at the same time, on a mobile 8th gen i7, it doesn't lock up. The single thread passmark score is literally half your cpu! :D
winrid · 14h ago
Although I guess none of those projects are more than 150k loc.
trallnag · 17h ago
Are you experiencing these problems on your personal device or is it a corporate provided one full of scanners? IntelliJ is definitely slower on my work laptop compared to my private desktop. Might also be due to the larger project size and heavy usage of Spring, though
sensanaty · 13h ago
I have my work project loaded on my home PC, and to be fair it's a beast of a PC, but still it's insane how much power is wasted on the work macbook from the stupid MDM software running on it. It feels blazing fast on my PC, and the slowness is unbearable sometimes on the work laptop.
the__alchemist · 16h ago
Various personal devices over time.
discmonkey · 22h ago
Assuming that the plugin is enabled for the free version, CLion is also amazing for Rust. Thanks Jetbrains!
Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode) out there.
ainiriand · 22h ago
RustRover is already free for Non-Commercial use! I think it is the best IDE for Rust dev.
weinzierl · 21h ago
Yes, it is quite nice. That being said I keep a little statistic about IDE usage at the Rust events I attend. I have observed RustRover or CLion only three times at the 48 events I've recorded.
One of these three was an event at JetBrains. To be fair, I started my notes long before RustRover existed.
neovim is marginally more popular.
vscode is the crushing majority.
inetknght · 21h ago
Oh hell yeah! I used CLion about 6 or 7 years ago at my job, and it was a pretty great product for small projects. It used to slow down really bad for a medium-sized project though and I switched to VSCode.
I've since moved on to new employers, but I'd love to check it out again.
> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products.
Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.
But I'm heavily against Microsoft. I don't like usage statistics collection, but at least this is a direct competitor to Microsoft.
I had a chance to speak to some of the JetBrains folk at CppCon a couple years back. It was really nice and reassuring.
I'll check it out for personal projects and see if it's improved since years ago. :)
nsm · 19h ago
Jdk improvements and the new Nova/Rider backend how dramatically improved JetBrains performance. I highly encourage you to give it another shot.
riquito · 21h ago
> > It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products.
> Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.
How's that "basically true"? That's false. You can opt out. In fact there's very good documentation around that
Personally, I think it's a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting telemetry in their free products when Microsoft do the same in VS Code with hardly anyone voicing the same level of criticism for it.
voidspark · 17h ago
> a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting telemetry in their free products
Probably 99.99% of developers don’t care.
The ones who complain about it online are a tiny vocal minority.
voidspark · 11h ago
The CLion language engine was completely rewritten since then.
1over137 · 23h ago
Free version sends telemetry with no opt-out.
pasoevi · 22h ago
You can still use paid version if you want to turn telemetry off. With the free version, you can either use it and say thanks, or not use it at all.
badsectoracula · 22h ago
Indeed, this is one of the various options one has.
Another option is to not use it and be vocal against telemetry, hopefully convincing others to do the same while dissuading other developers (especially in a forum like Hacker News where people that build stuff gather) from adding it on their products.
unclad5968 · 19h ago
Genuine question. Why do you care if other people agree with you about telemetry? I almost always enable telemetry on anything I don't believe will serve me ads.
pjmlp · 19h ago
Democracy is the dictorship of the majority, thus when majority is fine with telemetry disabling it won't be an option any longer.
pasoevi · 22h ago
I wouldn't take people seriously who are vocal against telemetry in a product which has paid version with the option to turn telemetry off. Such people would be vocal against paying for the work others do. Also, if properly anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil people make it to be.
badsectoracula · 22h ago
> I wouldn't take people seriously who are vocal against telemetry in a product which has paid version with the option to turn telemetry off.
You are conflating two separate things, a product does not need telemetry to function and if telemetry is needed it can be opt-in. Similarly a product does not need to be free to have telemetry nor does it need to be paid to not have telemetry, as i already wrote these two are completely separate.
> Such people would be vocal against paying for the work others do.
Again you are conflating two completely separate things: people being concerned about the privacy implications of telemetry (both directly and indirectly, see below) and people who are against about paying others for their work.
> Also, if properly anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil people make it to be.
Even if anonymized (which is something you can only guarantee for open source projects that either you or someone you trust has checked they do such anonymization properly - and also you either build yourself from the source that was checked or you used a binary from a reproducible build) having telemetry in place still creates and reinforces a precedent of it being acceptable which in turn can be used to excuse other programs doing the same but those programs actually not caring about doing proper anonymization (at best) or even outright spying on you (at worst).
Besides anonymized data can still be used in conjunction with other data to be deanonymized and the best way to protect users from this is to not collect that data in the first place.
pasoevi · 22h ago
I'm not conflating these two things. I didn't say they have to have telemetry to keep it free. All I am saying is, if you have the option to pay and decide whether you give them telemetry or not, then there is no reason being vocal about them giving you more for free. It is a company and they need to make profit. If more users with telemetry enabled gives them more data that they can use to indirectly increase their profit, I only applaud them. If they stopped allowing to turn telemetry off for the product in paid version as well, then you would have a valid point.
That said, nothing wrong with being vocal about privacy and high standards in collecting usage.
throwaway51034 · 20h ago
Privacy is a fundamental human right, not something you get to withhold from people until they give you money.
Yes, I could pay them to get a product that lets me disable telemetry. I'd much rather just use something else, so I don't have to fund their unethical business practices.
bigstrat2003 · 19h ago
That is an extremely disingenuous framing of the topic. They make a product, which you can pay money for. If you prefer, they will also let you pay by sending them usage telemetry. In neither case are you being deprived of a human right or extorted in any way - it's a transaction where you receive a benefit in exchange for something you give to them.
ndriscoll · 21h ago
It's nonetheless useful for people to warn others about spyware. You can find the tradeoff acceptable (or be willing/able to put the necessary isolation in place) while thanking the other commenter for the heads up.
chrsw · 11h ago
I wasn't aware they were using telemetry in the free versions until this thread. Why I didn't just assume that a free service or product offered by a for-profit company isn't doing _something_ to extract value is beyond me.
blibble · 21h ago
facebook were certainly slapped down for attempting "consent or pay"
"anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
sofixa · 21h ago
> anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
If it's location data, yes. If it's your IDE usage stats (plugins, file types, whatever), not really.
woodson · 21h ago
Maybe it includes a list of fonts installed on your system, your screen resolution, etc. You don’t need much to get a “fingerprint” that is anonymous but can be correlated with those collected by other tools’ telemetry.
xp84 · 18h ago
In theory yes? But if state actors, the ones with the sophistication to literally build a signature based on your fonts using your IDE, and then infiltrate a second application to do... whatever... if they want you that bad, they're eventually just going to get you, even if they have to just send someone to your house with a rusty wrench to retrieve all your passwords. Those guys can get the job done much more cheaply anyway.
woodson · 12h ago
Nowhere was I talking about state actors. Most fingerprinting is done for ad targeting, as far as I know.
blibble · 13h ago
so we shouldn't worry about de-anonymisation because the government could kick your door down?
seems like a weak argument
KronisLV · 21h ago
Compared to most UI dark patterns and scummy tactics to get you to "consent" (actually tricking you into agreeing, because nobody can't be bothered to jump through like a bunch of legalese and dialogs), them just giving you that choice of straight up paying feels better.
Not really interested in their services, but at least that sort of payment would let me expect less trickery in the future.
> Critics of this consent model have called it "pay-or-okay", claiming that the monthly fee is disproportional and that users are not able to withdraw their consent to tracking as easily as it is given, which the GDPR requires. Massimiliano Gelmi, a data protection lawyer at NOYB, has stated that "The law is clear, withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it in the first place. It is painfully obvious that paying €251,88 per year to withdraw consent is not as easy as clicking an 'Okay' button to accept the tracking."
Under this model, you'd just have to refuse service to everyone who doesn't pay (killing your platform) or let people partake in your platform with no revenue off of them (killing your platform). Neither seems reasonable from the perspective of that business? Are they just supposed to find other ways of monetizing their users or perish then?
ndriscoll · 21h ago
Yes, declaring that to be illegitimate is the point. Just like we declare polluting rivers to be illegitimate despite it being good for business.
riquito · 21h ago
Not that people are obligated to use IntelliJ IDEs, but it's sad that it boils down to "You can have privacy if you can afford it". But admittedly is better to have the option to use it than not being able to use it at all
atemerev · 20h ago
Their telemetry promises not to collect private data. Yes, your code will probably used for training their models. But so it would be if you publish it on GitHub.
ndriscoll · 19h ago
All data on my computer is private unless I specifically make it public. Data thieves like to make a rhetorical sleight of hand where they say they're not really collecting data about you (this happens especially with the topic of "differential privacy"), but that's just gaslighting (i.e. trying to manipulate you into thinking you simply don't understand what they are doing). e.g. I'm not willing to share noisy correlations about my preferences either. That information is private, and it is information, or they wouldn't want it.
atemerev · 19h ago
Then you are free to not use their product.
My privacy is indeed differential. I am willing to give them the information on my coding patterns and even non-commercial code for a free license, if it is not linked to my identity. This is a fair exchange. I am not willing to do this if they will use this information to sell me ads, or sell it (unless properly anonymized) to some other company. And most certainly I won't agree if they collect any information beyond what's happen in the IDE.
Not _everything_ I do on my computer is fully private. I apply much stricter standards to things that are _really_ private. But not everything is like this.
This comment is public. It will probably be used to train yet another LLM. I am fine with that.
ndriscoll · 19h ago
Sure, but as I said elsewhere, it's still important that people point out that past the headline ("it's free") is that it is also malware (it spies on you). People were free to not use BonziBuddy as well, but it was rightfully characterized at the time as spyware. If the product also functioned as a proxy for botnet traffic, you wouldn't simply say "well you're free to not use it". You'd say "beware, the 'free' version is malware". Spyware is similar.
Posting to a public online forum is of course specifically making the post public.
rustc · 20h ago
How is this not illegal under GDPR? I thought asking users to pay money to not be tracked is not allowed.
wiseowise · 19h ago
It’s anonymized, GDPR doesn’t apply.
varispeed · 20h ago
So if you are poor, you are ripe for getting your data mined. Excellent.
int_19h · 1h ago
You don't have to use their products, though. Nor is there a shortage of free C++ IDE alternatives that don't have telemetry in them, for those to whom it is important.
“With the new non-commercial license type, you can enjoy a full-featured IDE that is identical to its paid version. The only difference is in the Code With Me feature – you get Code With Me Community with your free license.”
“We appreciate that this might not be convenient for everyone, but there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending anonymized statistics to JetBrains under the terms of the Toolbox agreement for non-commercial use. The only way to opt out is by switching to either a paid subscription or one of the complimentary options mentioned here.”
Also, if they find that unfortunate, why did they make the product do that?
codedokode · 16h ago
> there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending anonymized statistics
There is a way - simply use an open source alternative to JetBrains.
pjmlp · 22h ago
There is your price right there.
bayindirh · 23h ago
Yes, that one is a real bummer, actually, but if they're using something like how Go does it [0], at least it's tolerable if you're bound to using it.
Can you give us proof of that? I have not seen anything like that in my RustRover usage but it might be that I have missed that.
dardeaup · 22h ago
From the link: "It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics."
hiq · 22h ago
It's in the article:
> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics.
pacman1337 · 20h ago
couldn't we just block the traffic with /etc/hosts?
enigma101 · 22h ago
just use a firewall, no?
lern_too_spel · 21h ago
They're probably using the telemetry to monitor commercial abuse.
anastasiak2512 · 21h ago
The telemetry is used to analyzed the most used / unused features and to improve the product. For example, it's useful to understand that some specific technology gains more popularity among users and contribute more into its support.
lern_too_spel · 20h ago
I have no doubt that this is the primary use. It was the only way to use that data until now. Now that there is a free offering, there is a new potential use that neatly explains why it is required in the free offering and optional otherwise.
perrygeo · 19h ago
As good as LSP and other tooling has gotten recently, there are some C++ projects that just need a proprietary IDE for proper code navigation and completion. A lot of times my choice is a) spend 3 hours debugging why neovim's LSP is putting squiggly lines everywhere or b) just fire up CLion.
ivanjermakov · 11h ago
Huge benefit of current rise of "C++ killer" languages is that they're designed with LSP support from day 1. I had a great experience with Rust and rust_analyzer: open any project in LSP-capable editor and it just works.
AmalgatedAmoeba · 1h ago
Are they though?
* Rust was designed before even vscode was released
* Zig, Odin, JAI are all designed by people that don’t use LSP and don’t like it
* Don’t know about Carbon, but it currently doesn’t look like it’s gonna kill anything
It seems to me that rust analyzer is something of an exception
pasoevi · 22h ago
Great news. It is beyond me how people are complaining about the free version not allowing to turn off telemetry. Why don't you stick to the paid version if you are bothered by the (anonymous) telemetry?
badsectoracula · 22h ago
Because these two are completely separate things.
pasoevi · 22h ago
How?
badsectoracula · 22h ago
See my reply to the other comment you made[0] where you basically say the same thing.
Same reason responsible technologists warned less-informed users about installing BonziBuddy. It was a free product that told jokes or whatever just as it said it would. It was also spyware.
Responsible technologists should raise the alarm on spyware products because they are harmful toward their users. Malware is often given away for "free" (sometimes even sent to you without you asking!), so it doesn't really make sense to say "well that's the deal". Somehow people seem to be forgetting this over the years (I suspect because a lot more technologists make money from participating in the surveillance/malware economy these days, and it's gotten so bad that some of them have started to think malware distribution and exfiltrating (and often selling) user data is not a thoroughly black-hat activity).
If you're okay with adware or spyware or crypto miners or botnet proxies or whatever else running on your computer as a form of "payment", great. You consider that a reasonable "transaction". Other people appreciate being warned about such behavior. In any case, one shouldn't consider the product to be "free" as advertised.
missinglugnut · 18h ago
Having a checkbox that says "opt out of usage statistics" doesn't protect anyone against malware. Downloading from trusted counterparties does.
ndriscoll · 18h ago
Gathering user consent is what makes the difference between malware and not. If you click "Yes, upload this crash report" or "Yes, upload stats on what buttons I click", that's the program acting according to your wishes. If the program gathers and transmits that data without you asking or reviewing it and against your wishes, that's malware (i.e. malicious software that causes the computer to undermine its owner). Basically, does the computer obey the owner or not?
taylorallred · 17h ago
I love jetbrains IDE for all sorts of features (their git tools like diff checker are unmatched imo). I've been wanting to use them for C++ for a while now specifically because I find that many LSP solutions are not that great. Looking forward to using the non-commercial version of clion!
sgt · 21h ago
Incidentally, I recently tested Zig and I decided to try out CLion as the Zig IDE. Seems to work great with the ZigBrains plugin. It's still in development but ready for use.
cgh · 19h ago
Thank you, this is excellent information. Hopefully it beats the Kate + LSP experience.
demarq · 18h ago
This is a good move, more people will unwittingly be running a trial of the product.
I suspect there’s a whole lot of devs who’ve never experienced paid IDEs vs VsCode. Plus the community is about to grow insane.
Interested to see what happens
hiq · 22h ago
I'm curious about what non-commercial means in practice.
> Common examples of non-commercial uses include learning and self-education, open-source contributions without earning commercial benefits
What if I start writing code, let's say 80% of a codebase, then for the next 3 months I switch to another editor to write the next 20%, and then commercialize the support (so open-source but with commercial benefits)? Would it be about intent, i.e. it'd be fine if I had no plan to make a business out of it at the beginning, but as soon as there's the idea of a business I should have switched?
I guess in practice this mostly targets companies with 10+ employees so it's fine not to draw the line that clearly?
speed_spread · 22h ago
It means "stay under the radar if you are cheap". This is Jetbrains, not Oracle, there isn't an army of lawyers out to get you the second you breach the agreement.
dagmx · 21h ago
It’s a shame but not unexpected that people reward smaller companies giving their products away for free by trying to abuse the spirit of it.
deafpolygon · 21h ago
Probably why they want telemetry. Then, if you go on to make billions- they can sue when it's worth it.
mcflubbins · 18h ago
Great, but how about letting me have my paid, licensed Rust rover open on two PCs simultaneously?
I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it does this because I still had an old window open. Really unnecessary...
And you have different operating system usernames on both computers. It says if you have the same OS username on both you’ll be fine.
This works fine on my personal license with different usernames.
mcflubbins · 9h ago
> This works fine on my personal license with different usernames.
I just checked on my two machines different OS, different OS usernames.
Both copies of Rust Rover are signed in with the same account and have the same license.
I just tried launching RR on both machines and... I didn't have the issue that I've been struggling with for what seems like forever. This WAS definitely 100% an issue before though, I was trying everything to find an different editor to switch to.
The article you linked was "Updated November 5, 2024 at 11:17 AM"
So its possible they made a change since I stopped trying to do this and got in the habit of closing RR out on each machine... and didn't realize they actually did fix it.
Thank you.
seatac76 · 18h ago
I just bought the annual license for all IDEs did not know this was a restriction that’s a bummer. Surely they can do some pattern analysis to determine which systems belong to a single license.
For personal licenses it's a non-issue. For commercial, use the same username on both computers. If you have floating licenses, you need multiple licenses.
Aurornis · 18h ago
It’s not a restriction for personal licenses.
EDIT: Or if you a corporate license and have the same OS username on both computers.
seatac76 · 18h ago
Ahh I see. Thanks
mcflubbins · 9h ago
Can confirm this doesn't seem to occur anymore, they must have fixed in the past few months.
iainctduncan · 20h ago
Worth mentioning too that they have free student plans for all their IDEs for university students.
William_BB · 21h ago
I used to be a CLion user. Unfortunately, it could not keep up with our large and heavily templated C++ codebase. Although CLion Nova with the new ReSharper engine improved things a lot, we found our custom clangd with emacs/vim/VSCode to still be much faster and convenient.
I know CLion also has clangd, but I believe it's their own fork. I am also not sure if you can enable all clangd features since it's not the main engine. I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts about this.
mdaniel · 21h ago
My experience has been than complaining into HN does not result in changes to software. Have you submitted a profiling dump to YouTrack?
I have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to make an IDE (or any introspection tooling) because the number of ways humans can come up with to organize or author code is unlimited. So, I'm sure they would welcome feedback on "hey, watch out, modeling templates using this mechanism has bad perf in this IDE component"
William_BB · 21h ago
Not complaining at all! I have just heard of other people facing the same issues and assumed that this must be a well-known problem. It might also just be template heavy projects -- maybe it works great otherwise. I don't have much experience with CLion in other contexts.
koakuma-chan · 19h ago
I had the same experience with a large and heavily macroed Rust codebase.
varispeed · 20h ago
Why would you do that for a commercial product without getting paid?
nilamo · 20h ago
Why would you pay for a product and never want it to improve your workflows?
throwaway51034 · 19h ago
It's a commercial product. Expecting people to work for free for a billion dollar company seems a little out of touch. JetBrains can contact GP and discuss rates if they value that data.
DidYaWipe · 8h ago
That's interesting. This led me to their page, which also touted the now-free WebStorm.
Can anyone weigh in on WebStorm vs. VS Code for JS/TS development? I'm developing a back end with Deno running locally, and VS Code has been decent for debugging and using the language runtime. Would WebStorm offer any advantages?
travisgriggs · 20h ago
Pycharm is my goto for Python; I happily use AndroidStudio when working on our Android apps.
In the past when I tried CLion, I found that its need/desire to use cmake prohibited me from really using it. We have our own build scripts, and it seemed to struggle with that. Anyone know if that CMake bias still exists?
I ended up using Nova on my Mac for C code and have been pretty happy with that.
I would really really really love it if there was an Elixir skin for Jetbrains tools.
chuckadams · 20h ago
clion still needs a cmakelists.txt that's good enough to index the project, but it doesn't have to produce a usable artifact -- you can still build with make or whatever else you want. Probably cold comfort if you use a lot of third-party libraries, but otherwise it's a fairly set-and-forget kind of thing.
mdaniel · 8h ago
> clion still needs a cmakelists.txt
I don't believe that's true anymore.
I previously saw in their release notes that Makefile-based projects were out, but while digging up supporting links it seems their project formats list has gotten quite sizeable https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/project-models.html
This is amazing news. As a long time IntelliJ user (Android dev for 7+ years) who wants to start doing more c++, having free access to Clion is a godsend.
eric-p7 · 21h ago
Nobody actually wants to start doing more c++.
wizrrd · 21h ago
Make all IDEs free for non-commercial use to attract more users who might pay for services in the future — a win-win strategy.
giancarlostoro · 18h ago
One thing I wish JetBrains would explore is building a fully native NON-JRE text editor that is a direct competitor to Sublime Text, but has a rich plugin API. I would love to see their take on a Sublime like editor. Atom and VS Code were the only serious Sublime Text competitors for a while, but now VS Code has gotten insanely bloated over the years, and also Atom is defunct unfortunately.
I would love to see them build a fully native editor with their decades of knowledge.
hiccuphippo · 13h ago
They have Fleet which was supposed to be a competitor to VSCode. AFAIK it's written in Kotlin so still JRE (unless they are able to compile it to native?).
Maybe Zed would be more interesting for you.
ixmerof · 1h ago
YESYESYES
ferguess_k · 20h ago
Just curious, for low level mid-size projects ON LINUX, like a simple OS or a compiler, is Clion over-complicated or suitable? And how does the debugging look like?
I'm using VSCode with a manually written Makefile, and all of my debugging lives in gdb tui mode in a separate terminal. I do prefer a better UI though, but right now it's fine.
One concern is that Jetbriain IDEs usually takes a lot of memory. I do have a 16GB laptop though, so should be fine.
90s_dev · 20h ago
JetBrains IDEs always had difficult and unintuitive default keyboard shortcuts. I think it's just because of its age (same is true with Visual Studio). Whereas VS Code's out of the box shortcuts were relatively great. If JetBrains IDEs shipped with VSCode-style shortcuts as an option (not necessarily default) that I could switch to without having to manually remap everything, I'd be so glad to use them.
grondo4 · 20h ago
They do? Or at least the Jetbrains IDE I use the most (IntelliJ) will ask you the first time you start it up if you want to use VS code keybinds
90s_dev · 17h ago
Wow you're right. To be fair it was about 9-10 years since I last tried it, so either it didn't have that back then, or I forgot that it did.
leovander · 20h ago
They do have those options out of the box. I immediately switch them over to the VSCode bindings when on a new work machine.
they have a VS keybinding option out of the box, but the VSCode one is also available on the Marketplace
xp84 · 18h ago
They do. There are a ton of keybinding sets to choose from right there in the options. Heck, when i first started, I chose Textmate bindings!
bayindirh · 23h ago
This is good news. I for one, won't change my toolchain, but having a "free for personal use" alternative is always better, esp. when the license includes open source development.
Like it or not, C++ is not going anywhere in the short and long term, so it's always good to have real IDEs around (CLion, Eclipse CDT, etc.) which can integrate with good instrumentation and give real time feedback on your code.
FpUser · 22h ago
I have subscription that covers all their tools. CLion is my favorite when dealing with C++. So glad that hobbyist can use it now
mdaniel · 8h ago
And I recognize that I'm biased as a JetBrains fanboy, but I think it is just a stellar deal to pay $173/year for the all-you-can-eat pack where you get to keep them if you stop paying
I know folks are going to call out that the entry price is $289/year, but I still think for the number of included products that's still a deal
jasonlotito · 22h ago
So... not that it really matters I imagine, but JetBrains doesn't do pure subscription. Rather, you buy your IDEs, and effectively have a perpetual license to the product you bought. You get free upgrades, and if you keep paying, your license gets updated along with it.
If you don't continue paying, you still have the IDE you paid for. You just don't get updates. This seems like a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one in the world of subscription services.
So it's like what software licenses were 20 years ago. That's a good thing.
FpUser · 20h ago
Yep. Having perpetual license is precondition for me buying major development tools.
dismalaf · 19h ago
JetBrains does have a subscription option, including a monthly subscription to get all their tools.
int_19h · 45m ago
The yearly subscription includes the "perpetual fallback" license GP is talking about. With monthly, you get that once you've been subscribed for 12 months.
gh0stcat · 19h ago
This is cool, I briefly looked at using this to work on an unreal project, does anyone have any experience with using CLion with unreal? Is Rider or VScode still ideal?
chpatrick · 19h ago
I used to use CLion but switched to VS Code with the clangd extension. It's by far the best and snappiest C++ coding experience I've had.
deafpolygon · 21h ago
When it's free, you are the product:
"It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products. The data we collect is exclusively that of anonymous feature usages of our IDEs."
I'm aware it's common practice, but it's always good to read the fine print.
sofixa · 21h ago
Do you think JetBrains are making money of usage statistics of their IDE?
It's much more likely they use those stats to know which parts and features of their products are used, and therefore which need improvements/love/prominence.
deafpolygon · 17h ago
I have no idea what they're doing - only that now, the product contains telemetry and if I want to use the free product, I cannot opt-out. I don't consent to being tracked.
shortrounddev2 · 22h ago
Personally dislike jetbrains UX design but it's cool that Linux has a really good, free-ish IDE
memsom · 22h ago
If you use more than one of their IDEs on a regular basis, I'm going to be honest - it starts to make more sense that the change between IDEs is less jarring. I use Rider a lot, and Pycharm and Android Studio infrequently, and I like that all of the IDEs are so similar that I know how to do most things as the settings and menu system is almost identical. I also use the IDEs on Windows, Mac and sometimes Linux - and the UI is similar enough that I do not ever struggle to make something work that I have previously done in any of the platforms or OS versions
jghn · 22h ago
Also alternatives like VSCode have garbage for a debugging & profiling workflow compared to Jetbrains.
zoobab · 22h ago
So it will never be in Debian.
Artoooooor · 17h ago
Wow! Thank you for sharing, I would miss this otherwise.
hiatus · 18h ago
Can anyone comment how this compares to Dev-C++?
int_19h · 43m ago
It has working code completion for C++ (including templates), for starters.
Xss3 · 15h ago
Just bought it last week. Oops.
andy_ppp · 22h ago
What’s the Duck Duck Go equivalent for editors these days? Everything seems to be spying on me and/or offering to send my code to AI in the cloud.
bartekpacia · 22h ago
CLion (and other JetBrains IDEs for that matter) doesn’t send any of your code to AI in the Cloud (unless you use sth like AI Assistant yourself, of course)
andy_ppp · 20h ago
It does send telemetry and analytics I believe? I should have been broader in the tracking I specified…
tredre3 · 18h ago
All duckduckgo software is filled with telemetry and analytics that cannot be disabled (The search engine, the Android web browser, the Windows web browser).
The follow-on [rhetorical] question is what value it provides to you outside of its integration with the IDE (e.g. click to open, it being integrated right into the window of your editor, etc)
WhereIsTheTruth · 22h ago
I wish they'd extract the debugger and release it as a crossplatform standalone tool, i'd pay for it
freeone3000 · 22h ago
The debugger is primarily lldb, which has the same features (watches, expressions, locals) with not as slick a UI.
kanwisher · 22h ago
the debugger without the ide doesn't make any sense, just use the ide for debugging
DemetriousJones · 23h ago
Awesome news
globalnode · 20h ago
If its free, you're the product.
not_kurt_godel · 20h ago
Yes, they want you to eventually convert to a paying customer by using their software to make yourself money. How nefarious! (/s)
subzero06 · 22h ago
If something is free, you are the product - it is "free" but Anonymous data is collected.
____________g · 21h ago
I generally agree with the sentiment—if something is free, there’s often a tradeoff. But when there’s a paid tier, the free version can act more like an entry point or hook to get users into the ecosystem, rather than relying on harvesting user data. In JetBrains’ case, broad adoption brings a lot of strategic value on its own (like establishing industry standards or building community mindshare), so it makes sense for them to offer a genuinely free version without necessarily treating users as the product.
dist-epoch · 21h ago
Exactly, this I why I won't use Linux or Firefox, I don't want to be the product.
creatonez · 21h ago
Most Linux distros are completely free of any builtin telemetry. Your fears are unwarranted.
333c · 21h ago
I believe that's the point being made by the comment you're replying to
cbpowell · 21h ago
My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that the guy was being sarcastic.
thadt · 21h ago
We at the HN do not have a sense of humor we're aware of.
inetknght · 21h ago
Linux is free as in free speech. It's also open source.
Firefox... is free as in free beer.
noisem4ker · 17h ago
Firefox is covered by the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which is a free-as-in-freedom, open source software license.
What's your definition of freedom?
inetknght · 17h ago
> Firefox is covered by the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which is a free-as-in-freedom
Firefox is subject to a non-free terms of use.
> What's your definition of freedom?
Let me use the software without limitation.
creatonez · 13h ago
This AUP is related to the optional backend services run by Mozilla. The frontends for all of these services are open source, with no usage restrictions. It doesn't affect how Firefox is licensed in terms of copyright. Additionally, the backends for some of these services (such as Firefox Sync and Mozilla Accounts) are fully open source, so you could avoid the AUP if you wanted to.
toprerules · 22h ago
Every once in a while I fire up the old JetBrains Java monolith to see if it's finally surpassed my open source setup for the 200$ a year and up price tag and locked in spyware. Turns out it's actually somehow worse than previous iterations now that I need AI integrations, their models are awful, it's still a clunky resource hog on it's own, and there's nothing you can get for 200$ that you can't get paying yourself and installing some VSCode or Vim plugins that do the same stuff for free (and without the spyware).
NoboruWataya · 22h ago
Agree that it is a crazy resource hog and I don't like the AI integrations either. But I gotta say for UI and features it is very good. I haven't been able to get VSCode or neovim to offer the same kind of easily actionable code diagnostics and suggestions as JetBrains IDEs do out of the box. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I couldn't quite match it even with a fair bit of tinkering.
KronisLV · 21h ago
I like the AI integrations (they me use Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini 2.5 and GPT 4.1 with my all products pack) and quite enjoy their Junie tool, much better than my attempts at getting Aider working.
UI seems pretty okay, at least on the 2025 versions of the tools (in compact mode, Inter 12 as the custom UI font on a 1080p monitor) but still quite the resource hog.
Oh well, I’m actually going to try their Fleet as well after reinstalling my OS because it was worse than VSC the last time I tried it, might be better now.
sitefail1 · 21h ago
It's not. The functionality gap between VSC and Fleet has further widened, and its future looks even more unsure now they backed out the Kotlin native stuff back to the main IDEs.
jillesvangurp · 21h ago
The community edition of intellij and pycharm is Apache 2.0 licensed and you can use those for commercial development. Pycharm is about similar to vs code (I've used both). But intellij blows the Java & Kotlin support in vs code out of the water. It's not even remotely close. Reason, Java has several decent OSS IDEs as an alternative and those would win by default if the only option was a paid IDE. Clion and Rustover are somewhere in between I suspect.
VS Code plugins vary from language to language. And commercial non OSS tools for native development are pretty common (e.g. Visual Studio, XCode, etc.). So, I guess Jetbrains feels more comfortable charging for Clion and Rustover for commercial development because they know they are that good. But nothing wrong if you don't appreciate what is on offer.
Yes these tools use some memory and CPU. But then I use a decent laptop as well so it doesn't matter to me. Pretty normal to be spending on proper tools if you do this stuff professionally.
mdaniel · 21h ago
> Pycharm is about similar to vs code
You and I have had vastly different experiences. PyCharm, like the rest of their tooling, will catch the most amazing bugs and LSPs don't hold a candle to that
____________g · 21h ago
I’m intrigued—what’s your setup? Do you use any advanced refactoring features like Change Signature or Extract Selected Members? It’s been a couple of years since I last tried setting up Java in VS Code, and I’m curious how far things have come. Intuitively, I’d expect JetBrains to have the upper hand in this area, since they can build specialized UIs for complex tasks, rather than being constrained by the limitations of the Language Server Protocol.
toprerules · 20h ago
Nowadays I just use an LLM. None of these features are relevant anymore. Unless JetBrains has a proprietary LLM that is better at coding than what ever else is on the market (they don't) then there's no reason to pay money for their products.
I am not even particularly bullish on AI, but not seeing how LLMs have made IDEs irrelevant is like using Vim and crying foul about IDEs without trying one out.
troupo · 20h ago
> I’m intrigued—what’s your setup?
Quite often it's vim/emacs with a crazy collection of plugins and custom-written scripts where the most powerful tool is a fuzzy search.
Surprisingly few people know what an actual powerful IDE can even do.
toprerules · 20h ago
Incorrect, many of them do, and make the determination that a few nice to have features doesn't outweigh the cost, lock in, and incongruence with the use of open source software where possible.
I know several world class developers who have invented corner stone technologies that use text editors without any plugins and just run the compiler in a separate window. It turns out that you actually are not held back by not having your hand held by an IDE, it was just a skill issue.
the__alchemist · 18h ago
This gives me the impression that you are speaking about something you don't have tacit experience with.
troupo · 18h ago
> Incorrect, many of them do,
Most of the time in these discussions it's revealed that no, they don't.
My example, my coworkers use VS code, so I review their code and my IDE is highlighting a few bugs in a function, bugs like $x is not defined , so I ask if thir IDE does not show any warning for that code, and yes, VS Code had ZERO warnings. The dev copy pasted some code but forgot this $x variable in, either he needed to copy it or remove it.
So I am sure someone will say that after you install VS code you should install X and Y plugins or some npm packages that you trigger later in the build to catch this errors. With Intellij I get them without screwing around with VS code plugins or vim plugins, and I also feel good that I pay some developers to work on a tool I use then use Microsoft product that would instantly fuck me over when Intellij would be killed by this unfair competition. Or did I read recently Microsoft already started with their bullshit related to the extensions and AI ?
- Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)
- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."
- In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories.
- It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger space does not compute.
Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a feature in their established products.
All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space look a lot like a bubble.
Which suggests that your framework is lacking.
Here's where:
1. You're neglecting to look at the differences between the fast-rising stars and the comparable incumbents, and instead you're assuming that the incumbents automatically represent a ceiling. In this particular case, JetBrains obviously isn't the most ambitious company on the planet, and isn't focused on hyper growth. There are plenty of avenues for AI IDEs to grow and expand their revenue that have yet to be explored.
2. You're overestimating the importance of concrete moats. Google had no concrete moat either. Just because people can switch easily doesn't mean they necessarily will.
3. These companies aren't pre-revenue. I believe JetBrains is making something like $400-$500 million dollars a year, after 25 years. Cursor is at half of that in just 2 years. Windsurf is also doing big numbers.
4. Related to #3, you're underestimating growth trajectories.
5. You're leaving out the context. Companies that can afford to make $3B acquisitions (a) have tremendous war chests, and (b) have extremely ambitious goals. They're not looking to build the next JetBrains, they're looking to join the pantheon of $1T companies. Achieving massive 10x or 100x or 1000x growth as an investor/owner requires making asymmetrical bets -- bets where if you lose you're still okay, but if you win, you win big.
ie it's a mistake to estimate the potential upside by looking at the size of the current developer market.
As you move you're coding tools towards a less technical customer base - there are two synergistic effects - your potential customer base is much much larger, and they are simultaneously less technically competent on average ( and so less likely to build their own tools if you charge too much ).
Whether those assumptions are true - time will tell - but I definitely see more people thinking software development is now accessible to them.
Almost everyone here is providing business value in service of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
- Russ Hanneman
They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.
I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.
Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays for every engineers’ Cursor usage, can’t imagine how much it could cost, but they don’t have any encouraged integration with JetBrains… so while JetBrains products are good, I’m wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype pushing them to higher valuations
Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse).
That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context.
Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.
Since I dont need updates every 5 minutes, I disable the update checker if on Windows, and just don't update my software stack all of the time as it inconveniences me.
If you have fully memorized all of Linux and GLibC and all your supporting libraries then yeah, I guess you don't need powerful tools.
Which one?
Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...
AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..
People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.
I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.
Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.
Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.
To be fair with OP, I had a similar experience in the previous company. Sometimes after bumping a dependency or something, even if you asked IntelliJ to "Reload All Gradle Projects" something wouldn't work and I needed to restart the IDE. Not saying it was common, but it did happen. This was a Kotlin codebase.
Now working in a company using Scala, I had a few cases where IntelliJ failed to resolve a dependency correctly so it was saying that the class I just created didn't exist (this was in shared library and two different dependencies pulled it, but we did pin the dependency directly and sbt was building it correctly, it was only IntelliJ that was becoming confused). Cleaning up the build sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but even when it worked it would go back after a while. Eventually we updated all dependencies in all projects and it now always works, but it was painful for a while.
Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud, that's lazy.
Unless you prefer to think of the AI field as representable by a bunch of Indians actually behind software, as the sibling (insincerely and again lazily) reduces it to.
Do most people even know they're a Russian company? Do businesses decide not to invest for that reason?
Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
I think there will be also wave of private LLMs fine-tuned on corporate data, and it will be also good tools.
There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete working code.
It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday.
I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it internally, etc.
We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are hard constraints - a correctly working expression like 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code which does exactly this.
The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI, EF Core has some compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a solved problem although you may need to use a different API.
At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go) and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which specifically exploit it but is also a performance optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations, and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases, usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).
The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower stems from other sources of performance overhead that are typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which have "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation itself. There are technicalities like certain calls have to be indirect in order to support patching the callee address, or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers/callees may be constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to fix something in the integrated shell and giving up, but sadly forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back to nvim here, not for me.
It would be like investing in a horse-and-buggy whip manufacturers around the turn of the century.
They can't invest in AI the amounts that Microsoft can, of course.
In the worst case you’ll still be able to use AI tooling similar or equal to what you have in VS code. Even Windsurf has an JetBrains plugin.
Just vibe code away and never look at the source it’s generating.
That or they just drank the Kool aid
The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies fighting over startups.
Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing this fad much at all.
Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs.
So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al
Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from the conversation no matter how good your product is.
However that is a load bearing if.
I'm not being sarcastic at all. I feel I need to reiterate that because you got it wrong.
If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some of the money from it.
But then there’s another side where the fad has real value and the people investing have money because they’re smart and they recognize the value. And you have to be to make value in the fad.
But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
All these people with money didn’t all get it by being stupid or fddy or vaporware so they’re responding to signals of value and their responses are reliable indicators in general.
The same was true for Web3, Crypto, Machine Learning...
What actual value does bitcoin have? As an example, gold can be used to make high fidelity cabling.
No comments yet
Additionally, network effects and experience input and VC concentration in Silicon Valley are very real and very rational. For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already?
This might change in the near future, but I doubt it.
Very false. A lot of the best in the world have no intention of ever living in silicon valley. In my circles people dread even a week long trip there.
I have PTSD from accidentally opening CLion or PyCharm. Fans starts spinning and there is dozens of seconds wait to close this thing down.
I can't really comment on whether they are good or not since from my perspective I see people who are productive and unproductive using both of these tools, so to me it just looks like mostly a matter of preference. But newer developers don't seem to like these established IDEs and see them as you said: big, slow and laggy.
Some people like slow IDEs, because that gives them time to have a cuppa or browse Reddit when the "index is updating". I have no time for that.
IWhen i open a file /project from a collegue that uses VS Code is filled with errors and warnings because their VS code text editor is not actually understanding the code they are editing.
But overall I hope you’re right, I really want great agentic coding in PHPStorm.
Atom was an editor made by GitHub that competed with Sublime.
After creating Atom, GitHub pulled the editor guts out of it and initially called it "Atom Shell". https://github.com/mapbox/atom-shell
This then had a name change of Atom Shell to Electron to decouple Electron from Atom (the editor). https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron
Microsoft built several key tools on top of Electron (VSCode being the relevant one here) and became very interested in maintaining control of it... and so bought GitHub when it was up for sale.
Eventually, Atom was sunsetted. https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/sunsetting-at...
> Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we’ve decided to sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
> This is a tough goodbye. It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered it. Been using it since then for like 3-4 years now.
So far they haven't muddied the waters for any versions that already had free Community Editions (IntelliJ and PyCharm). The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have the Educational licence when I was in university. What was there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have any the wiser?
All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion, Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use. Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted licenses for certain users (e.g. students).
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/present-perfect-conti...
I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-commercial license. But so far they've been consistently opening them up one-by-one.
I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's a lot of ways it could go.
I don't recall offhand what features it does or doesn't support, and certainly not GOMODULES et al but just FYI
They did a similar "fuck you" to the Terraform plugin <https://github.com/VladRassokhin/intellij-hcl/blob/v0.6.14/L...> when they hired the developer and then made the built-in Terraform functionality basically abandonware :fu:
And then, in some extra weird behavior, they have CloudFormation still in the open <https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/idea/251....> but mysteriously it, too, is basically abandonware. Or maybe they're expecting the community to chip in and fix the bugs <https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues?q=subsystem:%20%7BLang...>. I dunno.
I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten IDEs that were so bad I discarded them immediately. Even early on, their refactorings were usually flawless. While I think I found one screwup, they were so good that they changed the way I coded. I could easily and reliably do refactorings that were otherwise pretty time-consuming and error-prone. I have continued using their products: mostly PyCharm now, and occasionally CLion.
Each new release improves the UI, and occasionally adds features that I find useful, and many that I don't. I suspect that I'm not alone in using a very tiny portion of the features they offer. How they can keep up with all the languages, and libraries, and frameworks is beyond me, but they seem to do it.
Their support has always been excellent. I once (v4?) complained that refactorings did not extend into configurations. E.g., if I rename a class Foo to Bar, then the runtime configuration running Foo didn't reflect the change. I reported it, and found a fix in the next release. Email with technical questions or bug reports is always handled promptly and thoughtfully.
They have always provided absolutely fantastic products for free. Yes, you gave up some features, but the free versions are really useful. I'm retired now, but continue to pay their licensing fees every year, for my hobby usage, because it's worth it, and they earn it. And the licensing is not onerous to use. What I really like is that you don't have to be on the internet to use their products, just for the license check. I wish all licensed products did that.
And beyond all this: They haven't sold out. They are one of the very, very few for-profit tech companies that have maintained a stellar level of product breadth, depth, quality, and support for such a long period of time. I'm sure they could have cashed in, sold to IBM and the product would have just rotted away, (sorry, IBM, but you know it's true). I can only think of one product that is comparable in this way, and that's Postgres.
Thank you, JetBrains, you have Figured It Out.
I'll be straight: for me personally there is no replacement, and I'll just patch the "unsupported" Commit Like a Sane Person plugin[1] indefinitely if I have to, but ... come on, don't strain our relationship like that
1: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26647-modal-commit-inte...
I experience major performance problems. They periodically bring my 9950 CPU to a crawl, or freeze, requiring a force-kill. (RustRover more so than PyCharm, but both are guilty). Memory hogs. (Feels like they leak memory). This is consistent behavior over the years, across a range of project styles.
I put up with the performance problems because of my first point!
The interesting/amusing part to me: My experiences do not seem wholly consistent with other users: Many users seem to find these IDEs heavy, but don't experience the freezes, crashes, or memory leaks. And many (most?) people claim VsCode is fine for managing multi-file projects. I don't know what to think!
I'm using RustRover. It's pretty lame compared to the IntelliJ experience. "Find usages" does not separate test code and application code; "copy reference" gets me the file name and line number instead of the fully qualified name.
I'd probably use vscode/cursor fully if I weren't so used to the JetBrains environment.
Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode) out there.
neovim is marginally more popular.
vscode is the crushing majority.
I've since moved on to new employers, but I'd love to check it out again.
> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products.
Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.
But I'm heavily against Microsoft. I don't like usage statistics collection, but at least this is a direct competitor to Microsoft.
I had a chance to speak to some of the JetBrains folk at CppCon a couple years back. It was really nice and reassuring.
I'll check it out for personal projects and see if it's improved since years ago. :)
> Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.
How's that "basically true"? That's false. You can opt out. In fact there's very good documentation around that
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/telemetry
> You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di....
Also, each extension (including Microsoft's) may collect its own telemetry. The blog post https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry has more details.
Personally, I think it's a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting telemetry in their free products when Microsoft do the same in VS Code with hardly anyone voicing the same level of criticism for it.
Probably 99.99% of developers don’t care.
The ones who complain about it online are a tiny vocal minority.
Another option is to not use it and be vocal against telemetry, hopefully convincing others to do the same while dissuading other developers (especially in a forum like Hacker News where people that build stuff gather) from adding it on their products.
You are conflating two separate things, a product does not need telemetry to function and if telemetry is needed it can be opt-in. Similarly a product does not need to be free to have telemetry nor does it need to be paid to not have telemetry, as i already wrote these two are completely separate.
> Such people would be vocal against paying for the work others do.
Again you are conflating two completely separate things: people being concerned about the privacy implications of telemetry (both directly and indirectly, see below) and people who are against about paying others for their work.
> Also, if properly anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil people make it to be.
Even if anonymized (which is something you can only guarantee for open source projects that either you or someone you trust has checked they do such anonymization properly - and also you either build yourself from the source that was checked or you used a binary from a reproducible build) having telemetry in place still creates and reinforces a precedent of it being acceptable which in turn can be used to excuse other programs doing the same but those programs actually not caring about doing proper anonymization (at best) or even outright spying on you (at worst).
Besides anonymized data can still be used in conjunction with other data to be deanonymized and the best way to protect users from this is to not collect that data in the first place.
That said, nothing wrong with being vocal about privacy and high standards in collecting usage.
Yes, I could pay them to get a product that lets me disable telemetry. I'd much rather just use something else, so I don't have to fund their unethical business practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay
"anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
If it's location data, yes. If it's your IDE usage stats (plugins, file types, whatever), not really.
seems like a weak argument
Not really interested in their services, but at least that sort of payment would let me expect less trickery in the future.
> Critics of this consent model have called it "pay-or-okay", claiming that the monthly fee is disproportional and that users are not able to withdraw their consent to tracking as easily as it is given, which the GDPR requires. Massimiliano Gelmi, a data protection lawyer at NOYB, has stated that "The law is clear, withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it in the first place. It is painfully obvious that paying €251,88 per year to withdraw consent is not as easy as clicking an 'Okay' button to accept the tracking."
Under this model, you'd just have to refuse service to everyone who doesn't pay (killing your platform) or let people partake in your platform with no revenue off of them (killing your platform). Neither seems reasonable from the perspective of that business? Are they just supposed to find other ways of monetizing their users or perish then?
My privacy is indeed differential. I am willing to give them the information on my coding patterns and even non-commercial code for a free license, if it is not linked to my identity. This is a fair exchange. I am not willing to do this if they will use this information to sell me ads, or sell it (unless properly anonymized) to some other company. And most certainly I won't agree if they collect any information beyond what's happen in the IDE.
Not _everything_ I do on my computer is fully private. I apply much stricter standards to things that are _really_ private. But not everything is like this.
This comment is public. It will probably be used to train yet another LLM. I am fine with that.
Posting to a public online forum is of course specifically making the post public.
“With the new non-commercial license type, you can enjoy a full-featured IDE that is identical to its paid version. The only difference is in the Code With Me feature – you get Code With Me Community with your free license.”
and (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/05/clion-is-now-free-f...)
“We appreciate that this might not be convenient for everyone, but there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending anonymized statistics to JetBrains under the terms of the Toolbox agreement for non-commercial use. The only way to opt out is by switching to either a paid subscription or one of the complimentary options mentioned here.”
Also, if they find that unfortunate, why did they make the product do that?
There is a way - simply use an open source alternative to JetBrains.
[0]: https://telemetry.go.dev/privacy
> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics.
It seems to me that rust analyzer is something of an exception
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915600
Responsible technologists should raise the alarm on spyware products because they are harmful toward their users. Malware is often given away for "free" (sometimes even sent to you without you asking!), so it doesn't really make sense to say "well that's the deal". Somehow people seem to be forgetting this over the years (I suspect because a lot more technologists make money from participating in the surveillance/malware economy these days, and it's gotten so bad that some of them have started to think malware distribution and exfiltrating (and often selling) user data is not a thoroughly black-hat activity).
If you're okay with adware or spyware or crypto miners or botnet proxies or whatever else running on your computer as a form of "payment", great. You consider that a reasonable "transaction". Other people appreciate being warned about such behavior. In any case, one shouldn't consider the product to be "free" as advertised.
I suspect there’s a whole lot of devs who’ve never experienced paid IDEs vs VsCode. Plus the community is about to grow insane.
Interested to see what happens
> Common examples of non-commercial uses include learning and self-education, open-source contributions without earning commercial benefits
What if I start writing code, let's say 80% of a codebase, then for the next 3 months I switch to another editor to write the next 20%, and then commercialize the support (so open-source but with commercial benefits)? Would it be about intent, i.e. it'd be fine if I had no plan to make a business out of it at the beginning, but as soon as there's the idea of a business I should have switched?
I guess in practice this mostly targets companies with 10+ employees so it's fine not to draw the line that clearly?
I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it does this because I still had an old window open. Really unnecessary...
And you have different operating system usernames on both computers. It says if you have the same OS username on both you’ll be fine.
This works fine on my personal license with different usernames.
I just checked on my two machines different OS, different OS usernames.
Both copies of Rust Rover are signed in with the same account and have the same license.
I just tried launching RR on both machines and... I didn't have the issue that I've been struggling with for what seems like forever. This WAS definitely 100% an issue before though, I was trying everything to find an different editor to switch to.
The article you linked was "Updated November 5, 2024 at 11:17 AM"
So its possible they made a change since I stopped trying to do this and got in the habit of closing RR out on each machine... and didn't realize they actually did fix it.
Thank you.
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207...
For personal licenses it's a non-issue. For commercial, use the same username on both computers. If you have floating licenses, you need multiple licenses.
EDIT: Or if you a corporate license and have the same OS username on both computers.
I know CLion also has clangd, but I believe it's their own fork. I am also not sure if you can enable all clangd features since it's not the main engine. I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts about this.
I have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to make an IDE (or any introspection tooling) because the number of ways humans can come up with to organize or author code is unlimited. So, I'm sure they would welcome feedback on "hey, watch out, modeling templates using this mechanism has bad perf in this IDE component"
Can anyone weigh in on WebStorm vs. VS Code for JS/TS development? I'm developing a back end with Deno running locally, and VS Code has been decent for debugging and using the language runtime. Would WebStorm offer any advantages?
In the past when I tried CLion, I found that its need/desire to use cmake prohibited me from really using it. We have our own build scripts, and it seemed to struggle with that. Anyone know if that CMake bias still exists?
I ended up using Nova on my Mac for C code and have been pretty happy with that.
I would really really really love it if there was an Elixir skin for Jetbrains tools.
I don't believe that's true anymore.
I previously saw in their release notes that Makefile-based projects were out, but while digging up supporting links it seems their project formats list has gotten quite sizeable https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/project-models.html
And they have a "what can CLion do with projects in those formats" table further down that page: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/project-models.html#:~:...
I would love to see them build a fully native editor with their decades of knowledge.
Maybe Zed would be more interesting for you.
I'm using VSCode with a manually written Makefile, and all of my debugging lives in gdb tui mode in a separate terminal. I do prefer a better UI though, but right now it's fine.
One concern is that Jetbriain IDEs usually takes a lot of memory. I do have a 16GB laptop though, so should be fine.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/configuring-keyboard-and...
Like it or not, C++ is not going anywhere in the short and long term, so it's always good to have real IDEs around (CLion, Eclipse CDT, etc.) which can integrate with good instrumentation and give real time feedback on your code.
I know folks are going to call out that the entry price is $289/year, but I still think for the number of included products that's still a deal
If you don't continue paying, you still have the IDE you paid for. You just don't get updates. This seems like a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one in the world of subscription services.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
"It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products. The data we collect is exclusively that of anonymous feature usages of our IDEs."
I'm aware it's common practice, but it's always good to read the fine print.
It's much more likely they use those stats to know which parts and features of their products are used, and therefore which need improvements/love/prominence.
The follow-on [rhetorical] question is what value it provides to you outside of its integration with the IDE (e.g. click to open, it being integrated right into the window of your editor, etc)
Firefox... is free as in free beer.
What's your definition of freedom?
Firefox is subject to a non-free terms of use.
> What's your definition of freedom?
Let me use the software without limitation.
UI seems pretty okay, at least on the 2025 versions of the tools (in compact mode, Inter 12 as the custom UI font on a 1080p monitor) but still quite the resource hog.
Oh well, I’m actually going to try their Fleet as well after reinstalling my OS because it was worse than VSC the last time I tried it, might be better now.
VS Code plugins vary from language to language. And commercial non OSS tools for native development are pretty common (e.g. Visual Studio, XCode, etc.). So, I guess Jetbrains feels more comfortable charging for Clion and Rustover for commercial development because they know they are that good. But nothing wrong if you don't appreciate what is on offer.
Yes these tools use some memory and CPU. But then I use a decent laptop as well so it doesn't matter to me. Pretty normal to be spending on proper tools if you do this stuff professionally.
You and I have had vastly different experiences. PyCharm, like the rest of their tooling, will catch the most amazing bugs and LSPs don't hold a candle to that
I am not even particularly bullish on AI, but not seeing how LLMs have made IDEs irrelevant is like using Vim and crying foul about IDEs without trying one out.
Quite often it's vim/emacs with a crazy collection of plugins and custom-written scripts where the most powerful tool is a fuzzy search.
Surprisingly few people know what an actual powerful IDE can even do.
I know several world class developers who have invented corner stone technologies that use text editors without any plugins and just run the compiler in a separate window. It turns out that you actually are not held back by not having your hand held by an IDE, it was just a skill issue.
Most of the time in these discussions it's revealed that no, they don't.
The rest is a non-sequitur
Edit: Oh. You don't know either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917174
So I am sure someone will say that after you install VS code you should install X and Y plugins or some npm packages that you trigger later in the build to catch this errors. With Intellij I get them without screwing around with VS code plugins or vim plugins, and I also feel good that I pay some developers to work on a tool I use then use Microsoft product that would instantly fuck me over when Intellij would be killed by this unfair competition. Or did I read recently Microsoft already started with their bullshit related to the extensions and AI ?