Don't forget Unreal as well - I've used Rider on multiple AAA Unreal titles that include custom engine edits and it is significantly faster than VS at loading massive projects. The integration is great and allows for seeing blueprint classes and references in the C++ project.
I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot of references, so I would occasionally switch to VS when there were a lot of references to search through, but other than extreme cases Rider is just so much more pleasant to use.
Yeah they originally had a separate branch "Rider Unreal" but now it's part of Rider, C++ support seems mostly the same across both, except for project support. If IIRC Rider doesn't support CMake projects, but it does support vsproj projects, so if you generate vs files from cmake it'll load fine, but probably better to use CLion for any non-UE projects if using C++. I guess they're seeing it as .NET/GameDev IDE.
Honestly I don't know why there are so many almost identical IDEs.
I use both Rider (for mixed c++/c#) projects and CLion for C++ only.
I feel that Rider is somehow better than CLion at c++, even after CLion Nova (Intellisense based on Resharper backend) became a thing.
One difference is that I write boost::asio in CLion, and just vanilla C++ in Rider, and before Nova it was completely unusable with async code, now it's usable with async code, but after a few days of running the editor I end up with fatal IDE errors for CLion, and never for Rider.
VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.
I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%
> VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.
Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.
I mean, yes, VS Code certainly is great and all, but…
> It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is
no. From my perspective, it doesn’t even have 50% of VS features, and that’s probably a generous estimation. VS has lots and lots of features. Granted, many of them are irrelevant for most users most of the time.
Even Rider is lacking in comparison. It is very limited regarding debugging targets for example.
It started that way but wasn’t been for a while. In fact the last version was a rewrite using native macOS controls and optimized for Apple Silicon. Sad to see it go but heard great things about Rider for c# development.
Microsoft had continued to evolve it. And a few components from Visual Studio Windows were ported over to be common. But Visual Studio Mac was 100% rebranded Xamarin Studio which of course was just an evolution of MonoDevelop.
That's what I've opted for as well, and I have to say I prefer it. gdscript is a nice language for high level game scripting, and on the couple occasions I needed to bring in some high-performance code I found it super easy to build a gdextension in Rust.
Compile the engine from source and add your classes as a module. Cuts out all the gdextension glue code and then you don't need to ship a shared library.
What does "noncommercial use" mean in this context though? These are tools for work - is the idea that students can use them for free and then will start paying once they finish school?
It means you can use them as a hobbiest or a student. For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project.
If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay.
Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial success.
> For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project
It's worth noting that even before this change, you can get the entire JB suite for free if you regularly contribute to a qualifying OSS project https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/.
You need to apply once a year and you need to be a maintainer of an active oss project for the oss license. From my experience they're very lenient in regards to what they consider active, but I don't think I'd jump trough the hoops if I didn't start using Rider with the student license.
Free for non-commercial offers a easy way to get people to use it and hopefully advocate for it at their jobs.
What does Rider add to the Godot dev experience? (I'm not familiar with either ecosystem, but I thought I recall Godot having an IDE when I last booted it up to play with it).
The Godot IDE is mainly around GDscript and is very basic. This gives you all the good tooling you'd get from a professional IDE, has best in class refactoring tools, integrates well with stuff like debugging, has a huge plugin ecosystem, better out-of-the-box suggestions and code completion, integrates with AI tooling, etc.
As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.
As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.
Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.
- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.
I had a Rider license for a while but just let it lapse.
I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way).
I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.
We have a mono-repo with 100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript, 23k lines of Astro. No issues at all running it on a 2021 14" MacBook Pro with only 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD while also running multiple Docker containers for Postgres, Neo4j, Memcached, and LocalStack.
My take is that folks should not underestimate VSC; there are certainly things that Rider does better, but VSC is totally viable for modern .NET backend work.
It's not an all C# project; C# only comprises the backend.
All in, the mono-repo is somewhere over 250k SLOC with mixed languages (Vue SFC, TS, Astro, JSX, shell). So when VSC is loaded, it's not only handling C#, but also everything else.
Point is that VSC is more than capable of handling production scale, multi-language workspaces even on 2021 hardware with only 16GB of RAM.
It's not that VS Code can't load a large project, that is table stakes. It's that the tools it provides to work with those large code bases are like fisher price versions of the Jetbrains equivalents. If one take their tools seriously, and uses them to the maximum extent possible to increase productivity, reliability, and robustness of code then there is just no comparison between the two.
Don't get me wrong, I still use VS code for all front-end development and other ecosystems (such as Rust). But when it specifically comes to C#/.NET there is no substitute to Rider in my opinion.
I work on a almost 20 year old C# monolith, with 1000+ projects per solution. It doesn't even load in VS or VSC. Rider needs 16GB of ram, but manages to open it. I try to never close the IDE, as it takes 30mins to open.
What fan boy nonsense is this? The VSC support for c# is miles behind visual studio. Rider isn’t as good either, but it’s certainly better than VSC.
Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base?
This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC.
It’s a great editor; but not for c#.
The benefit of using it is absolutely zero unless you’re heavily leaning into the other parts of the VSC ecosystem (like a big typescript code base).
> it’s come a really long way
So has visual studio; and it started off better, and still is.
Rider is too.
I’m happy to die on this hill; if you’re using VSC for c#, it’s because it’s free, and perhaps good enough for some things; not because it’s better than the alternatives.
Even if you’re stuck on a Mac, I can't believe you honestly find VSC an acceptable editor after using rider.
If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?
Not trying to start an argument - I've never used Visual Studio with C# (I was a PyCharm user when I started learning Unity so Rider was an obvious choice) but I always assumed that Rider was better - because it was managing to survive as a paid product so it must have had an edge.
> If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?
I'm pretty sure Resharper existed before Rider. Also, the existence and utility of the plugin is a mystery to me. I tried it once and it adds so many attention disturbing behavior especially in the bottom bar that I disabled it immediately. None of its feature was every needed in the company I work, and the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.
My point isn't that "people shouldn't use Rider"; I myself had a Rider license and it's a GREAT IDE.
My point is "you shouldn't skip C# because you think you need a license for an IDE to be use it professionally".
Devs who are already using VSC for doing front-end and want to try full stack can absolutely do heavy lifting in VSC.
I let my license lapse not because Rider wasn't a great IDE, but because VSC is fully capable for backend and fullstack work.
> I think you're crazy
I'll take that as a compliment :D. Even back in 2021 when I was invited to present at the Azure Serverless Conf[0], I chose VSC for my session to showcase that anyone could start developing .NET without expensive licenses (a common myth).
"What fan boy nonsense is this?" Good way to start a VS fanboy post.
Personally, I have written APIs in C# from scratch to production entirely in VSC; your assertion that "It’s a great editor; but not for c#" is literally false in my lived experience.
Rider is also good. And since I run Linux, VS took itself out of my consideration entirely.
That's my exact workflow nowadays. The best text editing experience with GH copilot and lowest battery footprint makes using a VSC a no-brainer. It's especially nice since it also happens to be the choice for Rust, so I experience very little friction, not having to switch an editor and using capable CLI of .NET and Cargo.
For advanced scenarios Rider still rules, and this change is a very welcome one. I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse).
I recently upgraded my laptop and finally VS with Resharper is blazingly fast.
My old laptop was a an 8th gen i7 with SSD and 32GB of RAM.
New one is a 13th gen i7 with an NVMe and 64GB of RAM.
I suspect the biggest difference is the NVMe. It probably also helps that I’m using Windows 11’s Dev Drive where I’ve enabled all the policies mentioned in their docs to minimise the impact of Windows Defender.
And finally, so much RAM means Windows gets to keep a lot of my working files cached.
Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?
It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy
That said, if you mean "checked" as in checking for compliance, I don't think anonymous usage statistics are for that. For that they would need to not be anonymous. If they could identify who was improperly using the community versions, it would break the pinky promise of anonymity. (And for the record I personally doubt they are secretly correlating anonymous usage statistics, but if they were, using them for license compliance would either revealing that they did this or at least parallel construction.)
That all said, I think everyone will just have to form their own opinion on whether to trust their statements and whether this is acceptable.
I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs - the way it understands code relieves so much mental overhead when tracing through my code, finding usages, refactoring, etc. It's one of the rare pieces of software I actually enjoy using. I just can't justify the cost for personal use for the amount I use it, and the fact that I've never really monetized a side project.
Super happy they're making this move. I think there's good logic to getting people hooked with free personal use so they can convince their company to buy licenses for everyone at work.
Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode?
I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?
I've ditched PhpStorm licence quite a while ago after I stopped working with PHP. Tried using VS Code for personal JS projects, but I had to install a few plugins to make it more efficient and still having a strange issue on Linux, when Terminal panel is open, whole code editor feels sluggish. I don't really like how IntelliSense works on VS Code, but that's on me, as there's a plugin or some setting somewhere to fix it. Also VS Code creates several strange directories in my $HOME directory, even when running in portable mode. From application size perspective - VS Code is marginally smaller, and starts a bit faster than IntelliJ IDE. But SublimeText is even smaller and runs circles around big IDEs, not to mention how good it is at handling large text files. At this day and age it comes to personal preference. It is great that new developers have a wide choice of IDEs freely available.
I’m a PhpStorm user so not familiar with Rider specifically, but in my experience JetBrains IDEs are exactly that: Integrated Development Environments. Whereas VSCode is more of a code editor first and foremost.
There’s tons of overlap between the two, and for casual development VSCode will usually be fine. But as a professional I rely on IDEA to make a living, and it rarely lets me down.
95% of everything I could ever need comes out-of-the-box, so I don’t need to go plugin hunting (though there is a broad range of IDEA plugins too). In fact the IDEA plugins are cross-compatible, so plugins for Rider will work in PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rubymine, etc.
The refactoring is outstanding, and leaps beyond what VSCode can do it. Basically it just understands my code like a real developer would. Not just simply checking syntax, but understanding project structure, naming conventions, coding styles, and more.
PhpStorm gives me access to a full debugger, with inline breakpoints and execution step controls. “Find Usages” is incredibly thorough and even understands dynamic symbol names in many cases.
Also I get a full MySQL and Redis client, right there in the UI. I can click on strings which refer to column names in my code, and they’ll appear in the DB panel instantly.
At the end of the day these are power-user features, but I’m glad to have them and feel significantly more productive in a JetBrains IDE. Embracing static analysis and a full IDE was probably the single most beneficial upgrade to my skills and career.
I've tried VS Code and Haystack (based on VS Code) for writing PHP and I just couldn't stand it after having used PhpStorm. Basic things like copying variables, indenting, moving lines into if statements, multiple cursors etc. just aren't intuitive in VS Code when writing PHP and a lot of the things I can do in PhpStorm with the press of a button just aren't possible.
I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.
It's difficult to quantify, but to me (large C# & TS projects) the difference between working in Rider vs VSCode is the difference between Notepad and VSCode.
The difference is big.
Also, often I think to myself "I wish feature X was available", only to find that it is and has been for a while in Jetbrains products.
Specifically, out of the box, these things work, and work exceptionally well. In my experience you can get 80% of the way there in VSCode, but it requires compromise and time, which I’m personally willing to throw money at to make go away.
There is a lot of praise here for JetBrains. I love their products, but sadly they joined the devcontainer race way too late and the condition of their products does not allow for serious development with dev containers. Their Gateway application is still in beta, and it doesn't always work, but it's faring much better than their early access devcontainer IDEs which are in a sorry state.
I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.
Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.
JetBrains licenses are one of the few software licenses that I pay for. Their IDEs have the features I need while keeping the UI from getting in the way.
I really, really wanted to like and use their IDEs (esp their Ruby 'intellisense' or w/e), but the lack of popular theme support kind of killed it for me. I wanted my IDE to look like my VSCode editor, but, at least a few years ago, that wasn't really possible since iirc there were only a handful of theme options.
You can theme it yourself without too much hassle. I like my dark mode to be black rather than grey, and just made it do that, and it just works. It took an hour or three to understand the process because I'm not a Java person and am not familiar with any of the tooling, but then it was super easy.
This was a few ago, so they may have improved that part by now, I've just carried my theme over the updates.
The pricing page says the Free version collects anonymous data. I understand the paid versions don’t. Does it say anywhere the kind of anonymous data that is collected in the Free version?
Beautiful. Rider is an awesome a much faster IDE and I use it whenever possible. It is not practical for all projects.
The only behaviour that annoys me a bit:
- Double clicking an identifier should select the full identifier. However, in Rider (as opposed to Visual Studio) it is connected to the CamelHump setting - which is useful by itself. In Visual Studio you can have both CamelHump enabled and “double clicking the identifier selects the whole identifier”.
- Any startup project tasks like maybe a “webpack watch task” is “in the way” when stopping run/debug of your current application. A separate task runner like in Visual Studio would be beneficial.
- If a solution has file templates defined, every user needs to activate/select them manually in the settings. Quite cumbersome.
There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users.
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.
I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".
I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.
They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
I agree that private companies can be good and I use Steam a lot, but Valve sucks in other ways. Their community is awful and developers can have posts openly calling for their death or calling them racial slurs and Valve support will tell them they won't remove the posts. I don't mean they deny the support request, I mean a person will respond and say "Yeah manage your community better." This is despite the fact they give no tools for community management.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.
I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?
They may mean that they're locked into continuing the subscription to keep getting updates because if you have a break then you start at the high price again.
Whenever you don't renew you get whatever version was out when you last renewed in perpetuity which is great. But if you decide you don't want it this year, but in two years you do, now you're back at the $289 price. Though if you pay $289 every other year you're still coming out ahead compared to an annual subscription so I don't know what the issue is.
Because you get a lifetime license for the latest version available when you pay, so you're getting less value the second year you pay since you're just paying for updates.
You can choose to pay every 3 or 4 years rather than yearly if you don't want to be locked in, but it will come out as a similar cost overall
As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.
This is great! I found myself preferring the rider student license I had at home to Visual Studio we had at work when I was actively writing a lot of c# and some f# recently. It didn't feel fast outright, but at least faster than VS, and the memory profiler was much more immediately grokkable to me.
I think it’s a bit worrisome that Microsoft can give away VS Code for free because they subsidize it in other ways, but JetBrains - a small software shop - clearly is being forced into this position.
Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, it seems worth pointing out that JetBrains has over 2,000 employees, so it's only small in comparison with industry giants, and that Rider has been successfully competing with "free" from day one: both VSCode and Visual Studio have been free for non-commercial and commercial use by individuals and small organizations for longer than Rider has existed as a product.
And Rider was built on IntelliJ and ReSharper, two products that successfully "competed with free" for many years before then.
So, if anything, I'd say that JetBrains is at worst reasonably well-positioned to survive dumping by larger competitors with more diverse product lines.
I suspect JB know most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses (I‘m guessing), so this shouldn‘t cut their bottom line significantly, while simultaneously giving them a foot in the door of potential new customers. Get them hooked for private / OS projects, then sell them commercial licenses.
Limited commercial use 1 to 3 devs should also be freek as projects this small usually are just starting and aren't profitable yet. Beyond that, yes , it should be sustainable for the team to pay for commercial license.
No. If you have money to pay for developers, you also have money to pay for tools. Especially since software licenses are going to be a tiny fraction of what the developers cost.
If they want to grab market share they should include dotMemory to the free offer. Basically dotUltimate without ReSharper. Otherwise free Rider users will need to install free Visual Studio for enhanced profiling.
Same, this has been a big struggle personally, as an engineer I try to be flexible with the tools I need to use, but I also want my tools to bring me joy, and Xcode brings me nothing but frustration
Same. Discontinuing AppCode was genuinely disappointing to me. Not sure if you can still download it, but it definitely hasn't seen a new major release since the 2023 version.
Apparently, not enough people thought like you. [0]
> While we’ve had some growth in terms of adoption, we didn’t reach the market share we had hoped for. We believe that the time has come to sunset the product and focus our efforts in other directions.
Many developers have gratis JetBrains license on account of being involved in FOSS. I'm in that category - have to apply each year for a license by referring to (one of) my FOSS library(ies).
It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.
Is Rider nerfed as much as the free version of IDEA is? And if not, then why isn't there a free noncommercial version of IDEA? This seems like a smack to the face for Java developers that want to use the full version of IDEA for noncommercial purposes.
Considering you get a better integrated environment rather than something designed more heavily around plugins you also get unquestionably much better refactoring tools.
One thing to note that I just learned: You cannot opt out of anonymous data collection if you use the free non-commercial license. (I'd probably still trust Jetbrains over Microsoft, but that's me)
What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done.
It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).
This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well.
Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.
A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free.
I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.
I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
I prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.
I respect your opinion and what you said makes sense.
That said, I find myself only ever using VSCode for "light" edits since it is somewhat faster to open and close from the terminal.
>> I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.
This is exactly the reason. When people use both VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs, a huge portion of them will end up becoming a Jetbrains user, and on someday, some of them can become paying customers
VSCode infrastructure is pretty broad and the community is pretty large. I only use it to make light code edits here and there but I would never put my whole project in it.
>>I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
Same here, the only plugins I installed were themes :)
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay
And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.
This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.
Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.
This seems to be what JetBrains has been betting on for a long time. Don't need to build a competent text editor if you can give management the right buzzwords.
Since it's a tool for writing code and not prose, it does not have to be a competent text editor if it's a competent "AST editor", which it very much is. Much more so than any alternative, commercial or otherwise.
I have access to both an MSDN subscription paid through my employer and Rider that I pay for myself. I use Rider over VS2022. Why? VS2022 is slower and way more flaky with Android development. Rider has Resharper built in. I like that I can use 1 IDE vendor's products for everything I need (Pycharm, IntelliJ, Rider, RustRover and Android Studio.)
Are you implying that JetBrains ides are not competent?
Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.
I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves.
Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy".
As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.
Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.
> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.
Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?
Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.
I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.
Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.
I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0].
I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently.
Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.
This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay
Citation very much needed?
Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.
There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free.
And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.
Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.
There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.
This is where remembering the free-costless and free-libre distinction is important. Linux is free-libre, so it's natural that it insists on its dependencies being free-libre.
Free-libre is necessarily also free-costless, but not the other way round.
> Visual Studio
It's interesting that everywhere I've worked as a Microsoft shop happily pays for MSDN, which gives you not just VS but a huge amount of other stuff.
Perforce handles large binary assets much better than git. There are also paid for closed version control systems that are really bad but get used anyway, such as in IC design.
Every single time someone posts about some commercial tool, in a website dedicated initially to startups, there is always a set of replies with half-baked open source alternatives to use instead.
Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month.
It's hard because developers don't usually have spending authority or budget. Often, nor does their manager or their manager's manager. To get the company to buy something you have to escalate to an absurdly high place in the org chart and so devs will often try to cobble something together out of free stuff, even if it's far less efficient, because spending developer time doesn't require permission whereas spending credit card balance does.
Unrelatedly, there's also to some extent an expectation that everything is free, even for commercial users. The most common pricing question I get about my product is "can't you make it free for commercial projects that don't have revenue yet", i.e. effectively asking me to become investors in their own venture. Because often they want to make a product company, but not spend any money to do so.
Source: I run a small software company that sells to developers.
No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.
This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top.
It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.
Before 2022, their de-facto headquarters and most of their employees were still located in St. Petersburg, even though the main company was registered in Prague.
> Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company.
The heavily populated parts of Russia, including the part where JetBrains was operating, are in Europe. (Russia’s not part of the EU, obviously, but “European” and “EU” don’t mean the same thing.)
Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees.
His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian.
However, be careful with the terms of non-commercial usage (Enforced heavy metrics)
"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."
"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."
I have loved JetBrains ever since I entered their ecosystem for the End of the World Sale in 2012. As a professional developer, I need my tools to work for me and not against me. That is why I pay for these tools and I appreciate JetBrains' consistent iteration on making them even better.
I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.
I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.
Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.
The design of the yellow/black cells holding language/tech tripped me out for a sec, on my laptop they're all crooked at the top but align themselves after a certain amount of scroll. Thought I was seeing an optical illusion but a refresh shows that it's not. I don't think this was intentional.
No, they're feeling pressure from VSCode (which is primitive in comparison, but good enough for most people). Thus the new theme (which none of the old users asked for) — total clone of VSCode UI, and this announcement. It's the opposite of what you're thinking.
Not sure which version of VSCode you think the new UI is a clone of, but I don't really see it. The tool buttons? VS has always had those, thought they had text by default. Tabs? VS has those too. Bottom bar? VS also. In fact, Rider looks like all the other Jetbrains IDEs - except Fleet, which is actually their VS Code competitor.
I'd been subscribed for the best part of a decade to their all products pack, liked the products, but they kept doing stuff that really rubbed me the wrong way in a paid product, e.g: shoving the AI offering down my throat and initially having no way to remove it, and then when I paid most recently, they sent me some spammy marketing for some third party product as a "thank you", and I cancelled my subscription there and then.
I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.
I was a paying customer for a long time, and their spam campaigns were the reason for my cancellation last year. Now I am a happy Microsoft Visual Studio Pro subscriber again. (happy in quotes btw)
It's a shame, I like the tools generally, but so much stuff is just about bombarding you with ads now, paying for a good tool is, to me, meant to be the way to avoid that, that really soured me on it all.
At launch it'd pop open the UI every time you opened any of the tools, and you couldn't uninstall the plugin. I understand you can now disable it, but it was annoying at the time, and demonstrated the issue I had with feeling like I was being advertised to in invasive ways despite being a paying customer.
This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...
I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.
Don't forget Unreal as well - I've used Rider on multiple AAA Unreal titles that include custom engine edits and it is significantly faster than VS at loading massive projects. The integration is great and allows for seeing blueprint classes and references in the C++ project.
I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot of references, so I would occasionally switch to VS when there were a lot of references to search through, but other than extreme cases Rider is just so much more pleasant to use.
I had no idea Rider supported C++. My impression was that it is for .NET only. How does it compare to CLion?
Yeah they originally had a separate branch "Rider Unreal" but now it's part of Rider, C++ support seems mostly the same across both, except for project support. If IIRC Rider doesn't support CMake projects, but it does support vsproj projects, so if you generate vs files from cmake it'll load fine, but probably better to use CLion for any non-UE projects if using C++. I guess they're seeing it as .NET/GameDev IDE.
Honestly I don't know why there are so many almost identical IDEs.
I use both Rider (for mixed c++/c#) projects and CLion for C++ only.
I feel that Rider is somehow better than CLion at c++, even after CLion Nova (Intellisense based on Resharper backend) became a thing.
One difference is that I write boost::asio in CLion, and just vanilla C++ in Rider, and before Nova it was completely unusable with async code, now it's usable with async code, but after a few days of running the editor I end up with fatal IDE errors for CLion, and never for Rider.
VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.
I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%
> VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route.
Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.
I mean, yes, VS Code certainly is great and all, but…
> It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is
no. From my perspective, it doesn’t even have 50% of VS features, and that’s probably a generous estimation. VS has lots and lots of features. Granted, many of them are irrelevant for most users most of the time.
Even Rider is lacking in comparison. It is very limited regarding debugging targets for example.
you have the dev kit installed and put your enterprise license in? whats missing?
Wasn’t VS for Mac a MonoDevelop build with amputated Linux support rather than a version of Visual Studio proper? Or am I out of date on this?
It started that way but wasn’t been for a while. In fact the last version was a rewrite using native macOS controls and optimized for Apple Silicon. Sad to see it go but heard great things about Rider for c# development.
Yes, that is what it was.
Microsoft had continued to evolve it. And a few components from Visual Studio Windows were ported over to be common. But Visual Studio Mac was 100% rebranded Xamarin Studio which of course was just an evolution of MonoDevelop.
> I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot
I wish Godot's syntax for .NET wasn't horrible though. Its so nasty looking that it just makes me want to use their native language instead.
That's what I've opted for as well, and I have to say I prefer it. gdscript is a nice language for high level game scripting, and on the couple occasions I needed to bring in some high-performance code I found it super easy to build a gdextension in Rust.
I started a Godot project with C# support since I'm coming from Unity.
I now have at least 50 GDScript files and not a single C# file, the language is good (with types).
My only issue is that I can't get Copilot in their integrated IDE and that Rider's GDScript plugin doesn't support anonymous functions right now
Forget gdextension imo
Compile the engine from source and add your classes as a module. Cuts out all the gdextension glue code and then you don't need to ship a shared library.
Wouldn't this make engine version upgrades a nightmare?
What does "noncommercial use" mean in this context though? These are tools for work - is the idea that students can use them for free and then will start paying once they finish school?
It means you can use them as a hobbiest or a student. For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project.
If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay.
Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial success.
I am a Rider fan so this is exciting.
> For example, you can now use Rider as the IDE on an Open Source project
It's worth noting that even before this change, you can get the entire JB suite for free if you regularly contribute to a qualifying OSS project https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/.
It means a wink, a nod, and perhaps a nudge nudge.
Game jams, releasing game for free- that makes up a whole lot.
Curious where the line is if you're using it during a YouTube video that you have a Patreon for etc.
I think most games built never make money.
It's explicitly allowed to be used for content creation.
Students or OSS
But it was already free for students, and they have a partnership program with OSS which allows you to use it for free as well.
You need to apply once a year and you need to be a maintainer of an active oss project for the oss license. From my experience they're very lenient in regards to what they consider active, but I don't think I'd jump trough the hoops if I didn't start using Rider with the student license.
Free for non-commercial offers a easy way to get people to use it and hopefully advocate for it at their jobs.
It was still a process. You had to have an established OSS project and go through the partnership process.
Now you can just use it for free for any hobby/oss projects without all the red tape.
What does Rider add to the Godot dev experience? (I'm not familiar with either ecosystem, but I thought I recall Godot having an IDE when I last booted it up to play with it).
The Godot IDE is mainly around GDscript and is very basic. This gives you all the good tooling you'd get from a professional IDE, has best in class refactoring tools, integrates well with stuff like debugging, has a huge plugin ecosystem, better out-of-the-box suggestions and code completion, integrates with AI tooling, etc.
As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.
As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.
Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.
- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.
I had a Rider license for a while but just let it lapse.
I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way).
I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.
VS Code is really good at certain things but it struggles on larger projects & doesn't have near the advanced features.
It's a very good choice though for a lot of projects. It's also a great way to try out C#. It has some amazing extensions for certain tasks too.
VSC feels pretty capable in my books.
We have a mono-repo with 100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript, 23k lines of Astro. No issues at all running it on a 2021 14" MacBook Pro with only 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD while also running multiple Docker containers for Postgres, Neo4j, Memcached, and LocalStack.
My take is that folks should not underestimate VSC; there are certainly things that Rider does better, but VSC is totally viable for modern .NET backend work.
100k loc is not big. That’s a small-medium sized project.
It's not an all C# project; C# only comprises the backend.
All in, the mono-repo is somewhere over 250k SLOC with mixed languages (Vue SFC, TS, Astro, JSX, shell). So when VSC is loaded, it's not only handling C#, but also everything else.
Point is that VSC is more than capable of handling production scale, multi-language workspaces even on 2021 hardware with only 16GB of RAM.
It's not that VS Code can't load a large project, that is table stakes. It's that the tools it provides to work with those large code bases are like fisher price versions of the Jetbrains equivalents. If one take their tools seriously, and uses them to the maximum extent possible to increase productivity, reliability, and robustness of code then there is just no comparison between the two.
Don't get me wrong, I still use VS code for all front-end development and other ecosystems (such as Rust). But when it specifically comes to C#/.NET there is no substitute to Rider in my opinion.
100k lines of code is definitely big and by no means a small project.
I work on a almost 20 year old C# monolith, with 1000+ projects per solution. It doesn't even load in VS or VSC. Rider needs 16GB of ram, but manages to open it. I try to never close the IDE, as it takes 30mins to open.
What fan boy nonsense is this? The VSC support for c# is miles behind visual studio. Rider isn’t as good either, but it’s certainly better than VSC.
Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base?
This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC.
It’s a great editor; but not for c#.
The benefit of using it is absolutely zero unless you’re heavily leaning into the other parts of the VSC ecosystem (like a big typescript code base).
> it’s come a really long way
So has visual studio; and it started off better, and still is.
Rider is too.
I’m happy to die on this hill; if you’re using VSC for c#, it’s because it’s free, and perhaps good enough for some things; not because it’s better than the alternatives.
Even if you’re stuck on a Mac, I can't believe you honestly find VSC an acceptable editor after using rider.
All I can say is I certainly do not agree.
If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?
Not trying to start an argument - I've never used Visual Studio with C# (I was a PyCharm user when I started learning Unity so Rider was an obvious choice) but I always assumed that Rider was better - because it was managing to survive as a paid product so it must have had an edge.
> If Visual Studio has better support for C# than Rider, why does Resharper exist?
I'm pretty sure Resharper existed before Rider. Also, the existence and utility of the plugin is a mystery to me. I tried it once and it adds so many attention disturbing behavior especially in the bottom bar that I disabled it immediately. None of its feature was every needed in the company I work, and the Rider crowd there don't seems to produce better code than those using VS.
100k lines of C# in 8 projects, 40k lines of Vue SFCs in 2 workspaces, 39k lines of TypeScript in a monorepo.
I use it every day on a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/512GB.
Works completely fine to the extent that I just let my Rider license lapse.
Well, perhaps anyone who’s thinking about it can do their own research in /r/vscode and read about how much people love c# dev kit.
TLDR; it’s not just me.
I’m glad you like it and have found a workflow that works for you. I think you’re crazy.
My point isn't that "people shouldn't use Rider"; I myself had a Rider license and it's a GREAT IDE.
My point is "you shouldn't skip C# because you think you need a license for an IDE to be use it professionally".
Devs who are already using VSC for doing front-end and want to try full stack can absolutely do heavy lifting in VSC.
I let my license lapse not because Rider wasn't a great IDE, but because VSC is fully capable for backend and fullstack work.
I'll take that as a compliment :D. Even back in 2021 when I was invited to present at the Azure Serverless Conf[0], I chose VSC for my session to showcase that anyone could start developing .NET without expensive licenses (a common myth).[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/azure-serverless-con...
"What fan boy nonsense is this?" Good way to start a VS fanboy post.
Personally, I have written APIs in C# from scratch to production entirely in VSC; your assertion that "It’s a great editor; but not for c#" is literally false in my lived experience.
Rider is also good. And since I run Linux, VS took itself out of my consideration entirely.
I use Visual Studio from work and personally subscribe to JetBrains.
For those developing commercial software on a budget, Visual Studio Code is an excellent option.
Although it lacks some features of JetBrains and Microsoft tools, pairing the .NET CLI with VS Code can still deliver impressive results.
if you can afford $10 monthly, integrating GitHub Copilot with VS Code can elevate it to a fancy, lightweight IDE
That's my exact workflow nowadays. The best text editing experience with GH copilot and lowest battery footprint makes using a VSC a no-brainer. It's especially nice since it also happens to be the choice for Rust, so I experience very little friction, not having to switch an editor and using capable CLI of .NET and Cargo.
For advanced scenarios Rider still rules, and this change is a very welcome one. I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse).
RustRover (Rust ide) is also now free for non commercial use
Oh. Very cool. Thanks for the heads up.
> - Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.
Wow. VSCode finally got them, it seems.
I also expect this to put pressure on C# DevKit team, right now its purpose is to only be good enough to drive people into Windows/VS, eventually.
Rider is the only comparable DX to VS outside Windows.
both webstorm and rider is free now? why am I still paying. been a customer for years but all I used was rider and webstorm.
free for non-commercial use.
What is the difference between Rider and Resharper?
Rider is an IDE that replaces Visual Studio and includes the resharper engine built in.
Resharper is a plug-in that is hosted by Visual Studio.
Resharper in Rider is pretty much the same as in VS, but in Rider it is native and always feels snappier to me.
VS + Resharper is painfully slow. Rider is refreshingly fast.
I recently upgraded my laptop and finally VS with Resharper is blazingly fast.
My old laptop was a an 8th gen i7 with SSD and 32GB of RAM.
New one is a 13th gen i7 with an NVMe and 64GB of RAM.
I suspect the biggest difference is the NVMe. It probably also helps that I’m using Windows 11’s Dev Drive where I’ve enabled all the policies mentioned in their docs to minimise the impact of Windows Defender.
And finally, so much RAM means Windows gets to keep a lot of my working files cached.
Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?
If you are willing to trust their own documentation, there is documentation about what is sent with anonymous usage statistics in Jetbrains IDEA IDEs:
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistic...
That said, if you mean "checked" as in checking for compliance, I don't think anonymous usage statistics are for that. For that they would need to not be anonymous. If they could identify who was improperly using the community versions, it would break the pinky promise of anonymity. (And for the record I personally doubt they are secretly correlating anonymous usage statistics, but if they were, using them for license compliance would either revealing that they did this or at least parallel construction.)
That all said, I think everyone will just have to form their own opinion on whether to trust their statements and whether this is acceptable.
I wish they would allow opt-out for people who have a subscription active on one of the other Jetbrains products.
WebStorm too
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...
Oh that's awesome!
I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs - the way it understands code relieves so much mental overhead when tracing through my code, finding usages, refactoring, etc. It's one of the rare pieces of software I actually enjoy using. I just can't justify the cost for personal use for the amount I use it, and the fact that I've never really monetized a side project.
Super happy they're making this move. I think there's good logic to getting people hooked with free personal use so they can convince their company to buy licenses for everyone at work.
This is pretty huge since web technology has always been the “paid tier” for JB products
Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode?
I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?
I've ditched PhpStorm licence quite a while ago after I stopped working with PHP. Tried using VS Code for personal JS projects, but I had to install a few plugins to make it more efficient and still having a strange issue on Linux, when Terminal panel is open, whole code editor feels sluggish. I don't really like how IntelliSense works on VS Code, but that's on me, as there's a plugin or some setting somewhere to fix it. Also VS Code creates several strange directories in my $HOME directory, even when running in portable mode. From application size perspective - VS Code is marginally smaller, and starts a bit faster than IntelliJ IDE. But SublimeText is even smaller and runs circles around big IDEs, not to mention how good it is at handling large text files. At this day and age it comes to personal preference. It is great that new developers have a wide choice of IDEs freely available.
I’m a PhpStorm user so not familiar with Rider specifically, but in my experience JetBrains IDEs are exactly that: Integrated Development Environments. Whereas VSCode is more of a code editor first and foremost.
There’s tons of overlap between the two, and for casual development VSCode will usually be fine. But as a professional I rely on IDEA to make a living, and it rarely lets me down.
95% of everything I could ever need comes out-of-the-box, so I don’t need to go plugin hunting (though there is a broad range of IDEA plugins too). In fact the IDEA plugins are cross-compatible, so plugins for Rider will work in PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rubymine, etc.
The refactoring is outstanding, and leaps beyond what VSCode can do it. Basically it just understands my code like a real developer would. Not just simply checking syntax, but understanding project structure, naming conventions, coding styles, and more.
PhpStorm gives me access to a full debugger, with inline breakpoints and execution step controls. “Find Usages” is incredibly thorough and even understands dynamic symbol names in many cases.
Also I get a full MySQL and Redis client, right there in the UI. I can click on strings which refer to column names in my code, and they’ll appear in the DB panel instantly.
At the end of the day these are power-user features, but I’m glad to have them and feel significantly more productive in a JetBrains IDE. Embracing static analysis and a full IDE was probably the single most beneficial upgrade to my skills and career.
I've tried VS Code and Haystack (based on VS Code) for writing PHP and I just couldn't stand it after having used PhpStorm. Basic things like copying variables, indenting, moving lines into if statements, multiple cursors etc. just aren't intuitive in VS Code when writing PHP and a lot of the things I can do in PhpStorm with the press of a button just aren't possible.
I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.
It's difficult to quantify, but to me (large C# & TS projects) the difference between working in Rider vs VSCode is the difference between Notepad and VSCode.
The difference is big.
Also, often I think to myself "I wish feature X was available", only to find that it is and has been for a while in Jetbrains products.
Superior: * Debugging * Refactoring
Specifically, out of the box, these things work, and work exceptionally well. In my experience you can get 80% of the way there in VSCode, but it requires compromise and time, which I’m personally willing to throw money at to make go away.
They are completely different products?
One is an IDE, the other is an editor. If you want an editor, of course you will not be happy if you use an IDE
The claim that VSCode was just an editor seemed flimsy the day it was released. Now, it is absurd.
I believe the JetBrains equivalent of VSCode is Fleet, which is already free. In other words, their code editor.
Webstorm is now also free for non commercial use
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...
I couldn't believe it. WebStorm is easily among the best IDEs for web work (some of my coworkers would say the best) today.
There is a lot of praise here for JetBrains. I love their products, but sadly they joined the devcontainer race way too late and the condition of their products does not allow for serious development with dev containers. Their Gateway application is still in beta, and it doesn't always work, but it's faring much better than their early access devcontainer IDEs which are in a sorry state.
I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.
Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.
JetBrains licenses are one of the few software licenses that I pay for. Their IDEs have the features I need while keeping the UI from getting in the way.
I really, really wanted to like and use their IDEs (esp their Ruby 'intellisense' or w/e), but the lack of popular theme support kind of killed it for me. I wanted my IDE to look like my VSCode editor, but, at least a few years ago, that wasn't really possible since iirc there were only a handful of theme options.
You can theme it yourself without too much hassle. I like my dark mode to be black rather than grey, and just made it do that, and it just works. It took an hour or three to understand the process because I'm not a Java person and am not familiar with any of the tooling, but then it was super easy.
This was a few ago, so they may have improved that part by now, I've just carried my theme over the updates.
They revamped the IDE a while back, it now feels much more VSCode-esque.
Theming has moved on a fair bit too...
The pricing page says the Free version collects anonymous data. I understand the paid versions don’t. Does it say anywhere the kind of anonymous data that is collected in the Free version?
This is also true of WebStorm now, too. Discussion on the announcement:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128
Beautiful. Rider is an awesome a much faster IDE and I use it whenever possible. It is not practical for all projects.
The only behaviour that annoys me a bit:
- Double clicking an identifier should select the full identifier. However, in Rider (as opposed to Visual Studio) it is connected to the CamelHump setting - which is useful by itself. In Visual Studio you can have both CamelHump enabled and “double clicking the identifier selects the whole identifier”.
- Any startup project tasks like maybe a “webpack watch task” is “in the way” when stopping run/debug of your current application. A separate task runner like in Visual Studio would be beneficial.
- If a solution has file templates defined, every user needs to activate/select them manually in the settings. Quite cumbersome.
There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users.
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.
I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".
I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.
They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.
RustRover is free for non-commercial use though?
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
They have always done that when they make a specific IDE for a language.
I agree that private companies can be good and I use Steam a lot, but Valve sucks in other ways. Their community is awful and developers can have posts openly calling for their death or calling them racial slurs and Valve support will tell them they won't remove the posts. I don't mean they deny the support request, I mean a person will respond and say "Yeah manage your community better." This is despite the fact they give no tools for community management.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
valve is nice but they're still taking a huge cut of revenue for doing extremely little work
To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
I would add Wolfram to that list. All three have cracked capitalism.
Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?
All Products Pack (12 IDEs, 3 extensions, 2 profilers)
first year - $289.00 (+$116)
second year - $231.00 (+$58)
third year onwards - $173.00
you're locked in because of an extra $116 the first year and $58 the second year?
https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye...
They may mean that they're locked into continuing the subscription to keep getting updates because if you have a break then you start at the high price again.
Whenever you don't renew you get whatever version was out when you last renewed in perpetuity which is great. But if you decide you don't want it this year, but in two years you do, now you're back at the $289 price. Though if you pay $289 every other year you're still coming out ahead compared to an annual subscription so I don't know what the issue is.
Because you get a lifetime license for the latest version available when you pay, so you're getting less value the second year you pay since you're just paying for updates.
You can choose to pay every 3 or 4 years rather than yearly if you don't want to be locked in, but it will come out as a similar cost overall
They're rewarding recurring customers, this is not a vendor lock-in.
As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.
I think some of Rider is written in C# vs all Java for IDEA. Could that be it?
what does free for non-commercial use really mean ?
if you make a game, then it gets popular what happens ? or some .net api?
I'm always confused by such licensing terms e.g what ended up happening with Unity.
This is great! I found myself preferring the rider student license I had at home to Visual Studio we had at work when I was actively writing a lot of c# and some f# recently. It didn't feel fast outright, but at least faster than VS, and the memory profiler was much more immediately grokkable to me.
Activation required. Still a nice deal.
Also looks like an online account is required.
Rider is much better and faster than Visual Studio, and it's worth every penny. Making it free is a great move.
I think it’s a bit worrisome that Microsoft can give away VS Code for free because they subsidize it in other ways, but JetBrains - a small software shop - clearly is being forced into this position.
Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, it seems worth pointing out that JetBrains has over 2,000 employees, so it's only small in comparison with industry giants, and that Rider has been successfully competing with "free" from day one: both VSCode and Visual Studio have been free for non-commercial and commercial use by individuals and small organizations for longer than Rider has existed as a product.
And Rider was built on IntelliJ and ReSharper, two products that successfully "competed with free" for many years before then.
So, if anything, I'd say that JetBrains is at worst reasonably well-positioned to survive dumping by larger competitors with more diverse product lines.
I suspect JB know most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses (I‘m guessing), so this shouldn‘t cut their bottom line significantly, while simultaneously giving them a foot in the door of potential new customers. Get them hooked for private / OS projects, then sell them commercial licenses.
Limited commercial use 1 to 3 devs should also be freek as projects this small usually are just starting and aren't profitable yet. Beyond that, yes , it should be sustainable for the team to pay for commercial license.
No. If you have money to pay for developers, you also have money to pay for tools. Especially since software licenses are going to be a tiny fraction of what the developers cost.
[dupe] More on official post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128
Well, these code assistant AI models won’t train themselves…
If they want to grab market share they should include dotMemory to the free offer. Basically dotUltimate without ReSharper. Otherwise free Rider users will need to install free Visual Studio for enhanced profiling.
For someone who just got into game development on Mac, this is very interesting. I'd never heard of this IDE before. Will give it a try.
You won’t regret it. They’re basically the industry leaders in IDEs. They also make JetBrains Mono, a fantastic monospace coding font.
I wish Jetbrains could save me from Xcode. Please.
Same, this has been a big struggle personally, as an engineer I try to be flexible with the tools I need to use, but I also want my tools to bring me joy, and Xcode brings me nothing but frustration
Same. Discontinuing AppCode was genuinely disappointing to me. Not sure if you can still download it, but it definitely hasn't seen a new major release since the 2023 version.
Apparently, not enough people thought like you. [0]
> While we’ve had some growth in terms of adoption, we didn’t reach the market share we had hoped for. We believe that the time has come to sunset the product and focus our efforts in other directions.
[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...
But who's going to save you from the Swift compiler? :)
Awesome news.
I really like their loyalty bonuses. The price for the whole thing drops down really low over time.
Many developers have gratis JetBrains license on account of being involved in FOSS. I'm in that category - have to apply each year for a license by referring to (one of) my FOSS library(ies).
It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.
Rider is by far the best C# IDE. Especially if you're not running Windows. It was a real lifesaver while working with Unity.
Btw, as a paying ultimate user for the Java EE features I was surprised how good vscode support for the same is. And completely for free
Is Rider nerfed as much as the free version of IDEA is? And if not, then why isn't there a free noncommercial version of IDEA? This seems like a smack to the face for Java developers that want to use the full version of IDEA for noncommercial purposes.
Full version of IDEA is "make your own IDE" since you can add almost everything from their other IDEs.
I'm learning F# and have been using VSCode. How different/better JetBrains Rider support for F# is?
Considering you get a better integrated environment rather than something designed more heavily around plugins you also get unquestionably much better refactoring tools.
One thing to note that I just learned: You cannot opt out of anonymous data collection if you use the free non-commercial license. (I'd probably still trust Jetbrains over Microsoft, but that's me)
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...
I'd definitely recommend trying it out now that it's free. Your taste may vary.
Hi, I'm the maintainer for the VSCode F# support. Rider support for F# is great, that team is very engaged, and I'd strongly consider it if
* you have mixed C#/F# projects in a solution (C# and F# support in VSCode can't communicate today)
* you use Rider for other technology
* you want paid support for your editor tools
* you prefer IDE-style experiences rather than editor/ extension-style experiences
* you want to take advantage of Rider features like their accelerated build caching
In my experience, Rider's support for F# is much more stable and usable than Ionide, or even Visual Studio proper.
Now do CLion. I cannot stand using VS on windows.
What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done.
It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/
I do pay for software, even subpar ones like Telerik's controls, for a while.
I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself.
Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free.
I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.
This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well.
Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.
A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free.
I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.
I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
I prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.
I respect your opinion and what you said makes sense. That said, I find myself only ever using VSCode for "light" edits since it is somewhat faster to open and close from the terminal.
>> I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.
This is exactly the reason. When people use both VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs, a huge portion of them will end up becoming a Jetbrains user, and on someday, some of them can become paying customers
VSCode infrastructure is pretty broad and the community is pretty large. I only use it to make light code edits here and there but I would never put my whole project in it.
>>I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box. Same here, the only plugins I installed were themes :)
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay
And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.
Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.
My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.
If your employer allows you to pay for development software, they can get into legal issues.
Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.
And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.
This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.
That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.
Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.
This seems to be what JetBrains has been betting on for a long time. Don't need to build a competent text editor if you can give management the right buzzwords.
Since it's a tool for writing code and not prose, it does not have to be a competent text editor if it's a competent "AST editor", which it very much is. Much more so than any alternative, commercial or otherwise.
I have access to both an MSDN subscription paid through my employer and Rider that I pay for myself. I use Rider over VS2022. Why? VS2022 is slower and way more flaky with Android development. Rider has Resharper built in. I like that I can use 1 IDE vendor's products for everything I need (Pycharm, IntelliJ, Rider, RustRover and Android Studio.)
Are you implying that JetBrains ides are not competent?
Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.
> selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).
All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.
I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves.
Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
> Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude.
You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.
They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy".
As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.
Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.
Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.
I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.
> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.
Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?
Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
We expect to get paid for satisfying someone else's requirements. We do not expect to get paid to scratch our own itches.
That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.
I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.
Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.
I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0].
I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently.
[0] This is explicitly allowed: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.
Yes, devs are explicitly allowed to use any editor they want. I'm not the only one who brings my own JetBrains, but I'm in a tiny minority.
This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay
Citation very much needed?
Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.
There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free.
And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free.
Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them.
There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.
This is where remembering the free-costless and free-libre distinction is important. Linux is free-libre, so it's natural that it insists on its dependencies being free-libre.
Free-libre is necessarily also free-costless, but not the other way round.
> Visual Studio
It's interesting that everywhere I've worked as a Microsoft shop happily pays for MSDN, which gives you not just VS but a huge amount of other stuff.
Perforce handles large binary assets much better than git. There are also paid for closed version control systems that are really bad but get used anyway, such as in IC design.
People usually dislike bait and switch schemes.
Every single time someone posts about some commercial tool, in a website dedicated initially to startups, there is always a set of replies with half-baked open source alternatives to use instead.
Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month.
Source: Myself
It's hard because developers don't usually have spending authority or budget. Often, nor does their manager or their manager's manager. To get the company to buy something you have to escalate to an absurdly high place in the org chart and so devs will often try to cobble something together out of free stuff, even if it's far less efficient, because spending developer time doesn't require permission whereas spending credit card balance does.
Unrelatedly, there's also to some extent an expectation that everything is free, even for commercial users. The most common pricing question I get about my product is "can't you make it free for commercial projects that don't have revenue yet", i.e. effectively asking me to become investors in their own venture. Because often they want to make a product company, but not spend any money to do so.
Source: I run a small software company that sells to developers.
No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.
It is the new Borland, hopefully they won't follow into the Inprise phase.
This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top.
It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.
I always thought the company was Czech? Though I think the founders were Russian nationals.
I guess it depends on what you consider a "Russian Company".
As a British national living in the USA, does that mean if I start a company it'll be a "British Company" forevermore?
Before 2022, their de-facto headquarters and most of their employees were still located in St. Petersburg, even though the main company was registered in Prague.
> Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company.
The heavily populated parts of Russia, including the part where JetBrains was operating, are in Europe. (Russia’s not part of the EU, obviously, but “European” and “EU” don’t mean the same thing.)
Kudos to Jebrains basically gifting Rider to Russians making it free of mandatory license and possibly malicious cracks
Did they have Russian developers and let them go? Or do you mean the ownership has changed?
My understanding is they relocated the developers who were in Russia
Correct, though they also lost some who were not willing to relocate.
That's really too bad, and not fair to the Russian developers. More 'collateral damage' from the NATO-Russia conflict.
Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees.
His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.
they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
> The Czech Republic is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the OECD, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group.
The company is not czech. Russians are an overwhelming majority of the employees.
It was founded by russian nationals but the company is formally czech and is more connected to the west than to Russia.
The majority of employees and C-level are russians. It is a Russian company.
Czech
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains
Majority of employees are russians including the C level
However, be careful with the terms of non-commercial usage (Enforced heavy metrics)
"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."
"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
Not just that, they will do some yucky things to exfiltrate data from your network to enforce this.
I have loved JetBrains ever since I entered their ecosystem for the End of the World Sale in 2012. As a professional developer, I need my tools to work for me and not against me. That is why I pay for these tools and I appreciate JetBrains' consistent iteration on making them even better.
I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.
I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.
Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.
I loved JetBrains IDEs years back.
These days I am mostly using NeoVim.
I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.
I would gladly pay them money even if I don't use their IDEs if only they provided a good language server.
I wonder though, do you expect good LSP to be available for commercial use free of charge?
The design of the yellow/black cells holding language/tech tripped me out for a sec, on my laptop they're all crooked at the top but align themselves after a certain amount of scroll. Thought I was seeing an optical illusion but a refresh shows that it's not. I don't think this was intentional.
What on earth is up with that? It's not just you. It happens in both Chrome and Firefox. After a very small amount of scroll it goes away?!?!
Sounds like they got a big present from Microsoft.
No, they're feeling pressure from VSCode (which is primitive in comparison, but good enough for most people). Thus the new theme (which none of the old users asked for) — total clone of VSCode UI, and this announcement. It's the opposite of what you're thinking.
Not sure which version of VSCode you think the new UI is a clone of, but I don't really see it. The tool buttons? VS has always had those, thought they had text by default. Tabs? VS has those too. Bottom bar? VS also. In fact, Rider looks like all the other Jetbrains IDEs - except Fleet, which is actually their VS Code competitor.
I'd been subscribed for the best part of a decade to their all products pack, liked the products, but they kept doing stuff that really rubbed me the wrong way in a paid product, e.g: shoving the AI offering down my throat and initially having no way to remove it, and then when I paid most recently, they sent me some spammy marketing for some third party product as a "thank you", and I cancelled my subscription there and then.
I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.
I was a paying customer for a long time, and their spam campaigns were the reason for my cancellation last year. Now I am a happy Microsoft Visual Studio Pro subscriber again. (happy in quotes btw)
It's a shame, I like the tools generally, but so much stuff is just about bombarding you with ads now, paying for a good tool is, to me, meant to be the way to avoid that, that really soured me on it all.
What is the problem you have with the AI? You can disable it, and otherwise it is run locally only. It does nice line-completion
At launch it'd pop open the UI every time you opened any of the tools, and you couldn't uninstall the plugin. I understand you can now disable it, but it was annoying at the time, and demonstrated the issue I had with feeling like I was being advertised to in invasive ways despite being a paying customer.