WebStorm 2019.3 EAP #7: Faster Startup Time and New Checkout Branch Action
WebStorm 2019.3 Early Preview build #7 is now available!
If you’re unfamiliar with our Early Access Program or if you want to catch up on all the new features, check out the previous EAP blog posts.
The Toolbox App is the easiest way to get the EAP builds and keep both your stable WebStorm version and any EAP versions up to date. Or you can download the EAP builds from our website. You can also get notified right from the IDE when a new EAP build is available: go to Preferences/Settings | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings | Updates and select “Automatically check updates for Early Access Program”.
Important! WebStorm EAP builds are not fully tested and might be unstable.
When announcing the start of the EAP program for WebStorm 2019.3, one of the things that we committed to was improving the IDE performance. With the EAP program coming to its end, we are ready to tell you about the most significant improvement in this area which is available in WebStorm 2019.3 EAP #7 (build 193.4778.12). For the full list of issues fixed in this update, see the Release Notes.
Faster startup
So far, one of the most common performance problems faced by WebStorm users has been the sluggish startup of the IDE. In the last two release cycles, we’ve devoted a lot of effort to reducing the time that users have to wait for the welcome screen to show up and for the IDE to open up with already indexed projects. As a result, you may expect WebStorm 2019.3 to handle this job significantly faster compared to previous versions.
Let’s clarify what exactly we mean by “significantly faster”. We’ve measured the startup time of WebStorm 2019.3 on different operating systems and compared these numbers with the ones for v2019.1 and v2019.2. To get accurate results, we used the same project everywhere: it was a React application generated with create-react-app, with the app.js file opened in the editor. Here’s what we’ve got:
On average, the startup time has been reduced by more than 40% compared to WebStorm 2019.1 and by more than 20% compared to WebStorm 2019.2. For now, the results are more optimistic for some OSs than for others, but we’ll keep improving this in the future.
To speed up the startup, we’ve introduced a number of substantial changes under the hood. Here are the most important ones:
- Some processes that used to run subsequently are now run in parallel.
- Icons are now rendered from the pre-build cache.
- Classes have been reorganized in a way that makes the initial class loading faster.
- Font loading on macOS has been optimized.
This is still a work in progress. We have some other major changes planned for WebStorm 2020.1, including, as usual, more optimizations of project indexing.
New actions for checking out branches
We’ve replaced the Checkout as… action for branches with two separate actions: Checkout and New Branch from Selected….
When used on a remote branch, the new Checkout action will first create a local branch with the same name and then set it up to track the remote branch.
Use the New Branch from Selected… action if you want to check out a local or remote branch but don’t want to track it.
Please report any issues on our issue tracker, and stay tuned for the upcoming release announcement!
The WebStorm Team
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