I'm an IntelliJ user on M2 Mac, I've been testing VS Code out of curiosity and found it a bit slow, even simple things like "go to definition" have annoying latency.
Out of pure curiosity, is there any alternative to JetBrains in this regard? I am aware of LSP, but skeptical that it can ever be fast due to its client-server design.
Any programming language is fine as long as it has static types.
My current primary workstation is very low spec and old compared to a M2 Mac. On that machine Sublime Text is very performant and provides an awesome code writing experience through LSP. I use it as a daily driver with TypeScript, Go and Dart. I try out IntelliJ (or Android Studio) and VSCode occasionally to check out how they are these days but they feel sluggish in comparison.
If you need more IDE-like features like running tests and builds or managing for example mobile phone emulators from the editor it requires more fiddling with configuration and plugins but is doable.
I actually found it kinda slow in terms of showing hints (squiggled highlights) and it doesn't seem to follow symbols across a project the way VScode and IntelliJ do. Guess it's more of an editor than an IDE in that regard.
Do you find IntelliJ slow? Once mine finishes indexing a project, the rest of the time it feels lighting fast. M2 Max here, 32GB. I think I allocated 16GB to IntelliJ (manually, in the help menu I think). I usually have Webstorm and RubyMine running side by side (for frontend and backend projects) along with a bunch of other apps and browser windows and they all feel really snappy. Hmm. Are your projects huge? Or does Java have a lot more overhead?
I have not found a better 'true' IDE experience than JetBrains. Once it has done it's thing, it works pretty good. If your projects are big like a C++ codebase +2mil LOC then well the latency is going to suffer.
If you count VSCode as an IDE then I would suggest neovim with an LSP and a fuzzy finder. It is the fastest/best dev setup I have experienced for most things.
If you are very latency sensitive I am afraid an IDE/'smart'-editor may not be for you. Then I again would consider some lightweight editor that has fuzzy search and no intellisense.
I don't think the client/server design of LSP is a limiting factor itself. That said, nothing seems to beat JetBrains these days so I am also on that wagon.
