Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster.
All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new.
At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Another big point was they implemented their own parsers for everything which allowed them to make nifty things - the refactor features way back in the early 10s was miles ahead of everyone else - but then LSP happened and that advantage is diminishing and becoming a liability
>IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij.
RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
I don't write Ruby, but I write Go and C, and C++ and I was left facing a new license. For no reason at all. It's the same debugger and the same code base, you just need to hook into gdb or lldb instead of all the other ones.
Like I said it's only one of the problems, read the rest.
The paid version of Intellij has never lost anything. Pretty much everything the specialized IDEs can do, Intellij can do too, though maybe some features lag. CLion, Rubymine etc are just less expensive specialized versions.
I'm sure the free version has lost some things.
Its been a long time since I used CLion but it was the best C++ IDE by a huge margin.
I agree CLion is the best as C IDE, but there is no reason that intelliJ couldn't do C/C++/Go, other than cashing in with new product lines and licenses.
Only ones that it can't is C/C++ (probably because that started as Apple only IDE) and .NET (that started as extension for Visual Studio).
They started Fleet that can do all of them, as a response for VS Code. But then came AI and Cursor probably took a large chunk of their users. So they redirected resources (like Zed that paused their collaborative features to focus on AI). There is currently a closed EAP for Cursor like ide based on Fleet. And their Git client as separate app.
The C++ plugin is included in Android Studio which is essentially a distribution of IntelliJ. There seems to be no technical reason for not allowing it in full IntelliJ.
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
Is it just me or the competition on the CPU market is about to get really interesting? My understanding is that if Intel loses the edge on fab-tech then the door is open for all kinds of new entrants. (I could be wrong though.)
Who knows, perhaps even Intel will use TSMC's process at some point.
The CPU market has been interesting for a couple of years. Intel effectively already lost the edge on fab-tech in terms of what they are able to produce. Forget about TSMC Xnm vs Intel Ynm... the numbers are meaningless. Look at the performance per watt of AMD's latest offerings vs Intel's. They are behind today.[1]
That said, in a lot of ways the really interesting stuff is likely to happen on the older nodes. There's really nothing enabling about the latest fab node... it's just bragging rights for the highest absolute performance and/or performance per watt for CPUs which most applications don't need and can't afford. ARM/RISC-V/whatever doesn't need 5nm to be feasible... in fact, those 'other' products often aren't viable on the latest nodes due to cost unless you're a market leader with huge volumes to amortize the cost over.
[1] Sure, they still offer the absolute top performance per thread... by a bit. But look at the price they're paying from a perf/watt standpoint to get there. I seem to recall AMD being ridiculed not too many years ago for doing this...
What makes you think new entrants? Just curious. On the fab side definitely not... there's really only 3 fabs competing on the bleeding edge side of things, and it costs way too much to open another. On the 'chip designer' side maybe, but I'm not sure why Intel's performance affects whether or not someone jumps in. I basically see a convergence coming, with ARM stuff getting better performance, and x86 stuff using less power...so there will be an interesting crossroads of sorts to see which direction things go.
The new entrants would be on the design side.
If Intel no longer holds the keys to best fab-tech in the world then all bets are off.
(I'm assuming that Intel doesn't allow competitors to use their fabs; and that Intel does indeed have the best fab-tech at the moment; maybe I'm wrong.)
Even a fabless semiconductor company (e.g. nVidia, Apple, heck, AMD) needs to spend hundreds of millions to tape out a leading-edge IC. It's a capital-intensive business, and would present quite a risky bet for any upstart competitors. Also, patents.
It would be fascinating for another major fab to arise. It's not impossible to imagine how either, a large chip designer with piles of cash could decide they want to get into fab, or a niche fab could slowly move into it?
Not going to happen unless there is some absolute paradigm shift in technology. Not many people throw around 20 billion dollars on upstarts.
The problem is that the paradigm shift technology we've read about multiple times has always been overcome by more investment in standard silicon processes.
Economically we're long past the point of contraction - there has been a ridiculous pace of mergers in the semiconductor industry to have the network effects to stay current. The effects are worse at the top, and we are down to three companies even in the race.
Basically, no, we'll never have another fab entrant who is a major player.
> My understanding is that if Intel loses the edge on fab-tech then the door is open for all kinds of new entrants. (I could be wrong though.)
Doubt it. There are only two players in the x86 market.
I haven't seen anything compelling for personal computer and server space yet to take over AMD or Intel. I believe AMD is going to gain some market share with their new products.
Lack of cash is not one of Apple's problems. If they wanted to invest more in the US they could.
Most of the money will probably just sit still in a wide variety of investments (bonds and other stuff; Apple is one of the biggest players in these markets); the rest will go into dividends and share buybacks. A symbolic percentage might go into R&D and Trump will tweet about it.
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view