It’s sad to see this happen to be honest. Seems like Jet Brains is getting distracted from their core value proposition: good IDEs. If electron based IDEs are becoming more responsive and performant than their “native” IDEs they have major priority problems.
What even distracts them? IDEs are supposedly the only thing they do. Well, maybe except for Kotlin. And it's not like their IDEs are very cheap either. I mean, not that cheep that I'd like the idea of being too much mentally invested into something, that barely competes with a free source-code editor, let alone lags behind it.
I don't actually know but my assumption is that that they're working with a very old codebase based on the "bespoke parsing and plugins for every language" paradigm that served them well for decades. Meanwhile eg VSCode is using the "language server with treesitter and queryable compiler genetically integrated over a standard API" model that's only recently become widespread.
When I first learned about LSPs it was immediately clear to me they would run circles around the "traditional" IDEs. I'd given up on using IDEs because I found them too finicky and error prone, but LSPs have been a total game changer.
I'm pretty sure they make most of their money from TeamCity build agents.
IntelliJ (the Java+ IDE) always has a community edition that is open source. I can vouch that it is truly free and not crippleware. For most Java programmer, this edition is sufficient.
There is Fleet, which they purport to be their next gen IDE. Which I haven’t even tried, though I am am avid pycharm user, so maybe it’s not getting the results they hope for?
