In the latest EAP build of IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2 we’ve extracted Java functionality into a separate plugin. This separates the Java implementation from the “platform” part of IntelliJ IDEA and introduces some flexibility for the future. For example, we could include Java functionality as a plugin to other products, and other plugins such as Gradle can now take optional dependencies on Java, and still work if Java isn’t available. The new plugin is not visible in Settings | Plugins and cannot be switched off, so there should be no impact on end users. However, if you’re writing a plugin for I

Since we started development on IDEA, every nightly build of each IntelliJ-based IDE was tagged in the intellij-community repository on GitHub. After 18 years of development and having 10 products, we now have more than 68,000 tags in the repository! This many tags causes performance issues with git, in particular, every git fetch is very slow. To improve the experience of working with the intellij-community repository, both for us and for our contributors, we have removed these tags. We're currently deciding on whether they are needed on GitHub and what our tagging strategy will be going f

When building an IntelliJ based IDE, we've historically packed class files from implementation modules into a single big JAR. For example, for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate this was idea.jar. However most of the classes in that JAR were IntelliJ Platform classes which are included in all IntelliJ-based IDEs. In IntelliJ IDEA 2018.1 we extracted such common classes to a separate platform-impl.jar file. Similarly, we extracted common platform API classes from openapi.jar to platform-api.jar. This can help to decrease build and startup time for the IDE, and also makes layout of different IDEs more consi