I assume I'll use emacs as long as I continue to use computers, and it's been decades since I thought editors really should be written in assembler, but this:
"I use an underpowered MacBook Air from around 2019"
and this:
"Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight"
are insane sentiments to express, and it's an insane world that makes those thoughts seem agreeable to anyone.
There is zero justification to consider a 2019 Air "underpowered" for this task. There is zero justification to consider that of course one needs an obscenely powerful portable supercomputer for this task.
IDEs do a lot. They do NOT do enough to justify this insanity.
I'm sure there's an element of people not knowing what's been lost, and an element of people not understanding just how inconceivably fast computers are today, but it's hard to wrap the brain around anyone tolerating this (as customers, as purchasers, as users).
Perhaps the same sort of jaw-drop that occurs when someone takes a naive python app to go or rust and discovers that python is in fact actually really slow (whether or not it's "fast enough")?
Well a modern IDE does way more than an IDE 10 years ago. E.g. I expect full text search that is pretty much instant. I remember times when a full search took multiple seconds to complete. Compilers for heavily typed languages are constantly re-compiling my code while I'm typing. Decent autocompletion has to perform tasks that are usually only required of a compiler. Code comments are converted into formatted documentation instantly, always available when I look for it. Device and build processes are monitored, git status is kept up to date, etc etc
I don’t see what you’re talking about. A bunch claim to be performance improvements - there are some additional features for language plugins that are similar to those that have already exist for other languages such as better completion (a language plugin completion/refactoring features shouldn’t be eating much CPU if that’s not the active file one is working with). A few more Java inspections, some Spring and Kotlin niceties, etc. All incremental. Most of these should not be terribly CPU eating with the existing infrastructure.
Search Everywhere and Find Usages at their core have been there far longer than a decade.
Seriously what is this major new infrastructural component in the past 10 years? One could argue these AI code things, but they’re mostly cloud.
I never wrote about new infrastructural components, you argued yourself into that corner. I wanted to express that IDEs have grown way more complex and capable, and that this added capability might explain why modern systems are needed to get a snappy experience out of them.
I’m saying the complexity of IDEs such as IntelliJ is concentrated in their base infrastructure of indexing and refactoring engine and that hasn’t changed all that much in the past decade. That there are more and more new language plugins and some nice UX features built on this core do not reflect some major new complexity in the past decade.
New language plugins and some incremental features that usually only cost when you use them have been added continuously for years.
IntelliJ was already capable in 2010. Your initial example was about fast global search - a feature available for more than 10 years.
If you are vaguely familiar with big software cores like the Linux kernel, you‘ll realize that extensions are often not „clean“ and need changes in the core, too. Yes, the Linux kernel is still super performant and runs on very old hardware, but you wouldn’t be able to run all those new features on old hardware that the kernel has accommodated since.
Entertaining, because I still run IntelliJ and CLion on a decade old Lenovo T430 running Linux with nothing more than a RAM upgrade and overall it works more smoothly now than it did 10 years ago.
This is due as much due to massive. improvements in the JRE itself over that time period in addition to IntelliJ itself.
I’m vaguely familiar with the Linux kernel enough to write drivers and contribute the odd mm or vfs patch over the years. But more pertinent - I develop an IntelliJ plugin.
I was asking for something specific and the response just gets more vague.
The best answer to this is look at the VS Code ecosystem (as Intellij is niche by a small number of developers). In that ecosystem you will have all kinds of plugins from things watching and notifiying you about pipeline status to things like DVC, etc that allow things that you couldn't do, at least not without severe side effects back in 2013.
The best thing to do is not look to the people reinventing the wheel. There are tons of new features in IntelliJ since 2013 including support for things like Go and Rust.
A modern IDE does nearly all the ai hype hopes to achieve, minus code completion. It reviews code, auto completes, hints good practice, searched code real fast, etc.
The target market is enterprise. If I showed up for my first day of work and they handed me a 2019 MacBook Air I'd be pretty unhappy.
I really don't get this attitude of indignation when a powerful machine's resources are fully utilized. What else are you doing with with that computing power? There's not some finite pool of computing power we are depleting here, they are figuring out how to make more all the time!
It's your right as a consumer to have a pro-consumption attitude, because you're spending your own money. Be thrifty. Be profligate. You choose.
But having it as a developer is a different matter. That "powerful machine's resources" aren't yours. They belong to your customer, and it isn't your business what your customer is doing with the computing power your program isn't using.
Writing programs that demand more resources than necessary forces people to discard and replace otherwise perfectly good computers. Which, again, you as the developer don't have to pay for.
If tragedies of the commons don't bug you, then none of this matters. But if they do, then imagine millions of people ordering millions of cardboard boxes from Amazon containing millions of sticks of DRAM to run that O(n^4) loop that you're about to check in.
I can sympathize with this attitude with things like a Slack clients, which are designed to run in the background, and which developers probably don’t have much choice over.
But there are plenty of lightweight IDE options. IntelliJ competes to be the most powerful IDE available. That implies using lots of compute resources for productivity gains that might be marginal or not even realized by all devs.
The 2019 Air is underpowered (1.6 GHz Dual-Core, 7W TDP[1]) even when comparing it to more affordable hardware from 2019 or secondary market business laptops from the prior 5 years or so.
The problem isn't that people are hogging all the CPU, the problem is that it's hard to get computers to people around the world, connect them to infrastructure (power, internet), and train people to use them. Plenty of smart people have actively tried to solve this problem and have failed. I'm not sure if adopting such a principle means anything whatsoever in the face of what appears to be a larger challenge than providing computing power to a willing yet deprived population.
MacOS is probably not helping that 2019 MacBook Air feel responsive. I have a Dell that's a little older than that running Linux and it doesn't feel slow or sluggish.
"I use an underpowered MacBook Air from around 2019"
and this:
"Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight"
are insane sentiments to express, and it's an insane world that makes those thoughts seem agreeable to anyone.
There is zero justification to consider a 2019 Air "underpowered" for this task. There is zero justification to consider that of course one needs an obscenely powerful portable supercomputer for this task.
IDEs do a lot. They do NOT do enough to justify this insanity.
I'm sure there's an element of people not knowing what's been lost, and an element of people not understanding just how inconceivably fast computers are today, but it's hard to wrap the brain around anyone tolerating this (as customers, as purchasers, as users).
Perhaps the same sort of jaw-drop that occurs when someone takes a naive python app to go or rust and discovers that python is in fact actually really slow (whether or not it's "fast enough")?
Get off my porch, whippersnappers, etc etc.