We’d like to unveil some of our current efforts to improve IntelliJ IDEA and the other IDEs based on the IntelliJ Platform. The results of these efforts are going to be released over the next year, some as soon as in the 2020.1 release in the spring. They are centered around two main themes: performance and support for modern development workflows.

Performance

Indexing Performance

Two of the main pain points related to the performance of our IDEs are startup performance (a tool that takes a long time to start is perceived as heavyweight) and indexing speed. We did a lot to speed up startup during this year, and next year we’re turning our attention to indexing performance.

We’re taking a multi-pronged approach to this problem. First, we’re making it possible to use prebuilt index chunks, so that every IntelliJ instance on the planet doesn’t have to do the same work of indexing the java.lang.String class. We plan to roll out the support gradually over the course of the year, starting with the JDK and then covering libraries from Maven Central, as well as interpreters and packages in other IDEs. We’re also investigating ways to support sharing of index chunks for project source code within a team or an enterprise, but we don’t have any specific plans at this point.

Second, we plan to make indexing less disruptive by making many more IDE actions available during indexing.

Third, we’re going to detect and notify you about indexing anomalies, including files that take too long to index, files that are reindexed too frequently, and index rebuilds caused by exceptions. Our aim is to provide clear steps for resolving such issues and improving the performance of our IDEs on your projects.

And of course, we plan to invest in good old performance optimizations to make sure that the indexing system doesn’t do any unneeded work and has no avoidable overhead. Continue reading →