back
388 comments
It's wild to me that Jetbrains has been making so many top-tier IDEs, languages, runtimes and other developer products for 25 years now and is valued at maybe $5B, meanwhile we have months-old "pre-revenue" startups releasing AI coding wrappers and raising money or being bought out for twice that.
Some relevant and timeless facts:

- Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.)

- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."

- In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories.

- It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.

"If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x or 1000xer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue; you're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money."

- Russ Hanneman

The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.

They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.

I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.

JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.

Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result: JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long before that.
What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object) and produce native and highly performant binaries.

It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday.

I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.

This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company. Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time preference which makes everything turn to shit.
I gave them a year of subscriptions before cancelling recently, the devcontainer implementation in their Ultimate versions is laughably bad, bugs upon bugs and tickets where their support staff just bounces it up with "still no fix" messages and customers are finding workarounds, i.e. downgrading docker installs.

Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to fix something in the integrated shell and giving up, but sadly forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back to nvim here, not for me.

Nobody is going to acquire JetBrains at a crazy premium to remove a competitor or to stay a competitor themselves. OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Meta will.

The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies fighting over startups.

Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing this fad much at all.

That's pretty much the comparison between Tesla and old-time car manufacturers. Most people who are trading Tesla stock don't even look at other car stocks.
I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use. I've never made any money off of my occasional side projects, so I could never justify the cost to pay for a license when I may go an entire year without using. But I really love their editors - their key mappings are an extension of me at this point, it's so smart about figuring out how the code works and letting you find usages or refactor without thinking, and their git UI is basically the only way I find git tolerable.

I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!

This is a love letter to JetBrains.

I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten IDEs that were so bad I discarded them immediately. Even early on, their refactorings were usually flawless. While I think I found one screwup, they were so good that they changed the way I coded. I could easily and reliably do refactorings that were otherwise pretty time-consuming and error-prone. I have continued using their products: mostly PyCharm now, and occasionally CLion.

Each new release improves the UI, and occasionally adds features that I find useful, and many that I don't. I suspect that I'm not alone in using a very tiny portion of the features they offer. How they can keep up with all the languages, and libraries, and frameworks is beyond me, but they seem to do it.

Their support has always been excellent. I once (v4?) complained that refactorings did not extend into configurations. E.g., if I rename a class Foo to Bar, then the runtime configuration running Foo didn't reflect the change. I reported it, and found a fix in the next release. Email with technical questions or bug reports is always handled promptly and thoughtfully.

They have always provided absolutely fantastic products for free. Yes, you gave up some features, but the free versions are really useful. I'm retired now, but continue to pay their licensing fees every year, for my hobby usage, because it's worth it, and they earn it. And the licensing is not onerous to use. What I really like is that you don't have to be on the internet to use their products, just for the license check. I wish all licensed products did that.

And beyond all this: They haven't sold out. They are one of the very, very few for-profit tech companies that have maintained a stellar level of product breadth, depth, quality, and support for such a long period of time. I'm sure they could have cashed in, sold to IBM and the product would have just rotted away, (sorry, IBM, but you know it's true). I can only think of one product that is comparable in this way, and that's Postgres.

Thank you, JetBrains, you have Figured It Out.

These are so interesting. From my perspective using PyCharm and RustRover: By far the best code editors, in terms of introspection and refactoring. The only ones I've used that model my projects correctly; VsCode and Sublime etc make it feel like I'm editing files, where are IMO the wrong abstraction.

I experience major performance problems. They periodically bring my 9950 CPU to a crawl, or freeze, requiring a force-kill. (RustRover more so than PyCharm, but both are guilty). Memory hogs. (Feels like they leak memory). This is consistent behavior over the years, across a range of project styles.

I put up with the performance problems because of my first point!

The interesting/amusing part to me: My experiences do not seem wholly consistent with other users: Many users seem to find these IDEs heavy, but don't experience the freezes, crashes, or memory leaks. And many (most?) people claim VsCode is fine for managing multi-file projects. I don't know what to think!

Oh hell yeah! I used CLion about 6 or 7 years ago at my job, and it was a pretty great product for small projects. It used to slow down really bad for a medium-sized project though and I switched to VSCode.

I've since moved on to new employers, but I'd love to check it out again.

> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products.

Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.

But I'm heavily against Microsoft. I don't like usage statistics collection, but at least this is a direct competitor to Microsoft.

I had a chance to speak to some of the JetBrains folk at CppCon a couple years back. It was really nice and reassuring.

I'll check it out for personal projects and see if it's improved since years ago. :)

Assuming that the plugin is enabled for the free version, CLion is also amazing for Rust. Thanks Jetbrains!

Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode) out there.

Free version sends telemetry with no opt-out.
As good as LSP and other tooling has gotten recently, there are some C++ projects that just need a proprietary IDE for proper code navigation and completion. A lot of times my choice is a) spend 3 hours debugging why neovim's LSP is putting squiggly lines everywhere or b) just fire up CLion.
Great news. It is beyond me how people are complaining about the free version not allowing to turn off telemetry. Why don't you stick to the paid version if you are bothered by the (anonymous) telemetry?
When it's free, you are the product:

"It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products. The data we collect is exclusively that of anonymous feature usages of our IDEs."

I'm aware it's common practice, but it's always good to read the fine print.

I have subscription that covers all their tools. CLion is my favorite when dealing with C++. So glad that hobbyist can use it now
I love jetbrains IDE for all sorts of features (their git tools like diff checker are unmatched imo). I've been wanting to use them for C++ for a while now specifically because I find that many LSP solutions are not that great. Looking forward to using the non-commercial version of clion!
Pycharm is my goto for Python; I happily use AndroidStudio when working on our Android apps.

In the past when I tried CLion, I found that its need/desire to use cmake prohibited me from really using it. We have our own build scripts, and it seemed to struggle with that. Anyone know if that CMake bias still exists?

I ended up using Nova on my Mac for C code and have been pretty happy with that.

I would really really really love it if there was an Elixir skin for Jetbrains tools.

Incidentally, I recently tested Zig and I decided to try out CLion as the Zig IDE. Seems to work great with the ZigBrains plugin. It's still in development but ready for use.
I'm curious about what non-commercial means in practice.

> Common examples of non-commercial uses include learning and self-education, open-source contributions without earning commercial benefits

What if I start writing code, let's say 80% of a codebase, then for the next 3 months I switch to another editor to write the next 20%, and then commercialize the support (so open-source but with commercial benefits)? Would it be about intent, i.e. it'd be fine if I had no plan to make a business out of it at the beginning, but as soon as there's the idea of a business I should have switched?

I guess in practice this mostly targets companies with 10+ employees so it's fine not to draw the line that clearly?

Make all IDEs free for non-commercial use to attract more users who might pay for services in the future — a win-win strategy.
This is a good move, more people will unwittingly be running a trial of the product.

I suspect there’s a whole lot of devs who’ve never experienced paid IDEs vs VsCode. Plus the community is about to grow insane.

Interested to see what happens

Very cool and I am quite thankful for Jetbrains free contribution! I understand peoples concern with telemetry but I can understand that there is some kind of trade-off from a free product, my wish is that they do the same with RubyMine.

Another thing I would like to discuss is this (it's kind flimsy so bear with me), Jetbrains IDEs are good and clean. One thing I dislike with these IDEs is that they do a lot in the background that feels like is outside of my control. I can't really point my finger exactly to where this feeling is coming from but I only get that impression when I use these heavy IDEs.

Say I want my development environment / settings / workspace config to be easily replicated and configured when someone new joins the project, will their Jetbrains IDE recognize it and prompt the user to adapt? Because that is one thing I enjoy with vscode, EVERYTHING is under my control and I can see what everything does. The buttons that runs different tasks can easily be viewed on .vscode/tasks.json, all config is within the .vscode folder!

In Jetbrains IDEs, some things are local only and you have to ask the peers to screenshare which config they had. I don't want that, I want the whole workspace to be easily replicated and shared.

I know Jetbrains is working on Fleet, I've been trying it out a couple of times and I like it, I hope they take this into their consideration.

I used to be a CLion user. Unfortunately, it could not keep up with our large and heavily templated C++ codebase. Although CLion Nova with the new ReSharper engine improved things a lot, we found our custom clangd with emacs/vim/VSCode to still be much faster and convenient.

I know CLion also has clangd, but I believe it's their own fork. I am also not sure if you can enable all clangd features since it's not the main engine. I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts about this.

Personally dislike jetbrains UX design but it's cool that Linux has a really good, free-ish IDE
Worth mentioning too that they have free student plans for all their IDEs for university students.
Great, but how about letting me have my paid, licensed Rust rover open on two PCs simultaneously?

I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it does this because I still had an old window open. Really unnecessary...

JetBrains IDEs always had difficult and unintuitive default keyboard shortcuts. I think it's just because of its age (same is true with Visual Studio). Whereas VS Code's out of the box shortcuts were relatively great. If JetBrains IDEs shipped with VSCode-style shortcuts as an option (not necessarily default) that I could switch to without having to manually remap everything, I'd be so glad to use them.
This is amazing news. As a long time IntelliJ user (Android dev for 7+ years) who wants to start doing more c++, having free access to Clion is a godsend.
This is good news. I for one, won't change my toolchain, but having a "free for personal use" alternative is always better, esp. when the license includes open source development.

Like it or not, C++ is not going anywhere in the short and long term, so it's always good to have real IDEs around (CLion, Eclipse CDT, etc.) which can integrate with good instrumentation and give real time feedback on your code.

One thing I wish JetBrains would explore is building a fully native NON-JRE text editor that is a direct competitor to Sublime Text, but has a rich plugin API. I would love to see their take on a Sublime like editor. Atom and VS Code were the only serious Sublime Text competitors for a while, but now VS Code has gotten insanely bloated over the years, and also Atom is defunct unfortunately.

I would love to see them build a fully native editor with their decades of knowledge.

Just curious, for low level mid-size projects ON LINUX, like a simple OS or a compiler, is Clion over-complicated or suitable? And how does the debugging look like?

I'm using VSCode with a manually written Makefile, and all of my debugging lives in gdb tui mode in a separate terminal. I do prefer a better UI though, but right now it's fine.

One concern is that Jetbriain IDEs usually takes a lot of memory. I do have a 16GB laptop though, so should be fine.

That's interesting. This led me to their page, which also touted the now-free WebStorm.

Can anyone weigh in on WebStorm vs. VS Code for JS/TS development? I'm developing a back end with Deno running locally, and VS Code has been decent for debugging and using the language runtime. Would WebStorm offer any advantages?

I've been a quite happy Jetbrains All Products Pack subscriber for several years now.
This is cool, I briefly looked at using this to work on an unreal project, does anyone have any experience with using CLion with unreal? Is Rider or VScode still ideal?
I used to use CLion but switched to VS Code with the clangd extension. It's by far the best and snappiest C++ coding experience I've had.
I wish they'd extract the debugger and release it as a crossplatform standalone tool, i'd pay for it
I really wish JetBrains released its terminal as a standalone product. It’s one of the best.
So it will never be in Debian.
Wow! Thank you for sharing, I would miss this otherwise.
Can anyone comment how this compares to Dev-C++?
What’s the Duck Duck Go equivalent for editors these days? Everything seems to be spying on me and/or offering to send my code to AI in the cloud.
Just bought it last week. Oops.
YESYESYES
Awesome news