Elixir IDE discussion

I’ve not tried anything eclipse with elixir so I could not say, but I do know at least that intellij itself is so slow, even scrolling is laggy. ^.^;

This doesn’t make sense to me.

IntelliJ gained popularity almost entirely because it was so much faster than the alternatives. I started using it back in 2005 when I was doing Java work and Eclipse or Netbeans were the other viable options. They were both so slow they were unusable and would eventually bring my entire machine to a crawl.

IntelliJ by contrast was so fast I couldn’t believe it and it’s always continued to be fast. I’ve used RubyMine heavily over the last few years and just recently switched to IntelliJ Ultimate because I’ve got so many languages plugged in that it just made more sense…but it’s been zippy every step of the way.

The only time I ever had a performance issue was after I switched to Fedora I noticed that startup times were around 20 seconds long and it turned out to be because of lack of a hostname reference in /etc/hosts. Soon as that was taken care of, everything was great.

Oh it is faster than Netbeans and Eclipse both as a Java IDE. However ‘as an IDE’ compared to other IDE’s (I like to compare it to KDevelop, vim, and emacs, and lately atom as well, which are all ones that I use pretty heavily) and it is dog-slow in comparison to those. So yes, in comparison to other Java IDE’s, it is fast, but it is not fast in the overall IDE ecosystem. ^.^

I meant back in 2005 it was already fast and has gotten faster since. It’s still faster than any alternative with even remotely equivalent functionality. Usually the slowest part is letting it finish indexing your codebase on startup which will vary based on size. Unless you are opening/closing the entire IDE constantly I’m extremely skeptical of poor performance claims.

Well what I experience most often are 2 big things:

1. Random freezes every few minutes where it freezes for 5-15 seconds when heavily using it.
2. Anytime there is any decent amount of code on the screen and I scroll then it does this low-FPS jumping movement that makes me a bit motion sick.

Both of which look very bad on it.

Compared to KDevelop, which I find an absolute king of IDE’s (at least for C++). It’s intellisense is better, faster, more detailed (I can even go through multiple levels of macro nesting and see each step unfold), and better yet is it never freezes or hurgurks with low-fps when scrolling. ^.^

Even Atom does not have that slow scrolling issue (although it does freeze on occasion, but those are more around freezing for 1 second every few minutes, which is more dealable).

And I tend to keep my IDE’s (KDevelop, emacs, vim, atom, intellij) running for weeks at a time without reloading, so no reloading issue there. ^.^

Let’s see, atom has been up for 39 days, 2 hours, and 23 minutes.

This computer has been up for… er… 509 days, 17 hours, and 53 minutes, I should probably reboot… (I’d like to see my work computer be up for this long… ^.^).

But overall the slowest part of intellij is easily the rendering performance, it is pretty abysmal. The rest of it seems pretty fast though, especially compared to other IDE’s built in Java.

That’s really strange. Never experienced anything like it.

Atom on the other hand, just kills my computer if it’s left open overnight.

Probably because Atom uses GPU-accelerated rendering where IntelliJ does all Java (with some C++ bindings) rendering, thus all on CPU. Intellij’s ‘rendering’ performance problems would likely be solved if they used a decent GUI toolkit (like QT5) instead of the horror amalgamation it uses currently (a weird mix of C++, Java, and some really low level bindings last I looked, all to avoid Swing).

If so you should submit a bug report, they have been really fierce on performance bugs the past year and things like it dying become priority 1 bugs. Are you sure you do not have a bad plugin installed? It has some great debugging tools built in.

For note, KDevelop uses QT. ^.^

I’ll give it another look. Ended up just using Sublime for a text editor though.

Good questions! I’ve never tried Atom’s elixir plugins, I’ll give them a shot today!

I switched from Intellij to Atom when we switched from Ruby to Elixir because of the same constant freezing issues on osx. I found my computer just runs better without rubymine running. Maybe some of the differences people are seeing are due to Windows vs OSX versions?

Atom’s not perfect either - not having an Elixir formatter is an annoyance, and I can’t figure out how to select a string in my iex window, but on the whole it’s a much smoother experience.

It feels like this discussion has derailed a bit, perhaps the IDE discussion should be split into a new thread?