It is recommended to use the currently bundled JBR version (JDK 11). Although later versions are available for testing, they are less stable as the author of this blog post mentions at the end.
Try running their products on a more recent JVM. They are actually usable and don't leave you feeling like you've been thinking in molasses. Ironic for a company called "jet" brains.
They (JetBrains) have been actively fucking a portion of their (one would think, technically savvy) customers by not giving them the most responsive system they can to run, then acting all paternalistic and gaslighty by saying "oh we don't recommend you use anything other than the one we ship." [1] when people complain.
Listen, JetBrains: I have wasted enough time (while my thoughts race ahead trying to work on my projects) sat on my phatass 64Gb NVMe-equipped Xeon, nvidia (native driver) Debian workstation waiting for pycharm et al to mooch along like at a stately pace redrawing the screen like it's a 1994 486 with an HDD. In the end my thoughts stopped racing and I began to think, yeah, well, I just gotta endure it... and then asking myself if I'm alone in this particular slow-motion hell-hole or is the world really like this?!
Once I had got to the bottom of it (notes here https://iam.georgecox.com/2021/11/24/making-jetbrains-ides-r...) I _instantly_ began to regain the feeling of fluidity of thought in my work. It was the biggest single productivity gain I've made in the past year, and I have had zero stability problems. Some debugging features are not available, but I haven't missed them.
At this point JetBrains would do well to take a leaf out of Apple's playbook from 2009 when they shipped the Snow Leopard release (Yes I am one of those that thinks that Snow Leopard was the best release of Mac OS X...) which concentrated solely on quality and speed, and no new features. [2]
Thank you for your attention. Merry Christmas ;-)
[1] a fact which gets parroted around various fora without any understanding of the problem because "it works on their computer" It seems that much of the improvements are for the benefit of MacOS X users, while the policy of sticking with a version 11 JDK is to the detriment of users on other platforms.
> JetBrains' attitude to this has been horrendous.
> Try running their products on a more recent JVM.
Isn't JDK17 literally two or three months old?
JDK17 was released on sep 17 2021. Meanwhile, IntelliJ 2021.2 was released on July 27 2021, and IntelliJ 2021.3 on November 30 2021.
Who in their right mind would dump a stable LTS release in favour of the latest and greatest in the middle of a point release? Specially on a production project which is expected to be rock solid, and quite possibly wouldn't be able to recover from a reputation hit caused by regressions introduced by hasty ill-advised migrations?
JDK 11 would be fine, but why have such a bad default config for the JVM? They literally use a deprecated GC algorithm instead of the default and set a way too low max heap size (I guess so people don’t say that it uses too much RAM, but all it does is making the GC run constantly)
Interim releases receive only 6 months of support. They'd have to switch the runtime version mid-flight, or leave users with an unsupported runtime, or dedicate a ton of resources to supporting JDK themselves (in addition to all the patches they do now).
I am sorry to hear about your productivity issues. I also experienced some slowness in recent builds, although I think our issues are not directly related, since I primarily use IntelliJ IDEA and not PyCharm. Following a recent issue I encountered on JDK 17, I was also advised to downgrade to JDK 11. [1] I think maybe they are waiting until JDK 17 is more stable for release, but anecdotally speaking, JDK 17 runs pretty well for me on osx-aarch64, save for a few minor hiccups. If the issue you are experiencing is a persistent one, you might also consider reporting a performance problem [2].
I've heard good things about JetBrains Fleet. [3] Although it has not yet been released, it seems to have many of the same features as the full IDEs and is more responsive in the editor department. Anyhow, I hope your experience improves and you have a Merry Christmas as well!
I'm doing fine now -- PyCharm and IDEA benefit greatly from using JDK16. Remember, I'm on Linux, you're on OSX where they had to make some font changes which, AIUI, are Mac-specific, and it seems like that has made them decide to stick with JDK11.
I will update the post I made on my blog with the JVM options for JDK17. [1]
I have had mixed success reporting bugs to JB, as is to be expected for a company their size.
I previously used IntelliJ IDEA on Linux for over eight years, so I can sympathize with your struggles. [1] Recently I started using OSX because my Thinkpad finally died and I could not find another laptop I liked. So far, it's been pretty bumpy, although I noticed that some things have improved (like fonts and build times). The downside is that many things currently do not work on aarch64 right now, and I somewhat regret making the switch this early. I recently started writing some Haskell, which was a pain to setup on my local machine but now that GHCi and Stack finally support it [2], I think it's getting stable. Hopefully more native libraries will offer support for aarch64, because despite the minor speedups (faster JVM), overall it's been a productivity-killer. Very few native libraries provide M1-compatible builds right now.
I tried this on my Intel Mac, using the JBR 17 (JCEF) download from Jetbrains. IDEA did start up, but the menus didn't work at all. The top-level menus were there, but they did not open any submenus. Other than that, things seemed to work. I wonder if there is a workaround.
> while the policy of sticking with a version 11 JDK
JDK 11 is an LTS release. JDK 17 only shipped a few months ago.
As a personal anecdote: I tried to upgrade a small microservice to Java 17 from Java 11. It took me a week hunting weird bugs and obscure undocumented things that suddenly just broke.
But sure. JetBrains should drop everything and move to JDK 17 the moment JDK 17 ships because?... Because what exactly?
The good thing with that kind of software is that you are not forced to use it and that there are a lot of alternatives adapted to everybody's preference. I'm happy to live in a world like that.
