CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use
346 comments
·May 7, 2025paxys
csallen
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.
gizmo686
When analyzing the value of a young, pre revenue company, one of the things you want to look it is how established comparable companies are valued. For AI coding assistants, the field is too young to do that directly. However, they are competing in the space of "developer productivity tool for writing code". That space is an established market that is currently dominated by IDEs.
Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger space does not compute.
Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a feature in their established products.
All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space look a lot like a bubble.
csallen
This analysis framework you're providing would've missed YouTube (pre-revenue; no incumbent successes; crowded with competitors like Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc). It would've missed Instagram (pre-revenue; no massive photo-focused incumbents; tons of competing photo sharing apps in the App Store at the time; no moat against a big social app adding filters). It probably. would've missed WhatsApp. And many others.
Which suggests that your framework is lacking.
Here's where:
1. You're neglecting to look at the differences between the fast-rising stars and the comparable incumbents, and instead you're assuming that the incumbents automatically represent a ceiling. In this particular case, JetBrains obviously isn't the most ambitious company on the planet, and isn't focused on hyper growth. There are plenty of avenues for AI IDEs to grow and expand their revenue that have yet to be explored.
2. You're overestimating the importance of concrete moats. Google had no concrete moat either. Just because people can switch easily doesn't mean they necessarily will.
3. These companies aren't pre-revenue. I believe JetBrains is making something like $400-$500 million dollars a year, after 25 years. Cursor is at half of that in just 2 years. Windsurf is also doing big numbers.
4. Related to #3, you're underestimating growth trajectories.
5. You're leaving out the context. Companies that can afford to make $3B acquisitions (a) have tremendous war chests, and (b) have extremely ambitious goals. They're not looking to build the next JetBrains, they're looking to join the pantheon of $1T companies. Achieving massive 10x or 100x or 1000x growth as an investor/owner requires making asymmetrical bets -- bets where if you lose you're still okay, but if you win, you win big.
sgc
Reading a bit between the lines, it seems like the buyers either 1) think that ai assisted coding will get good enough that a lot more people will be doing it - that in the future companies in other fields will spend on it for their employees much the way they are paying for general ai assistants now. Or 2) more likely, they think they will get good enough to completely replace programmers, and the current coding assistant's role is mainly to gather information from developers to eventually replace them completely, by selling a spinoff product at a much higher price. They think they need spyware, and coding assistants are the best version available.
echelon
This should be nailed to the wall.
Almost everyone here is providing business value in service of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
immibis
It's not a waste of emotional energy to consider how to convert a company from the $5-billion slow and steady type to the $10-billion instant acquisition type. Indeed the premise of our economic system is that maximum value is created when people continually strive to maximize the values of their companies.
rf15
Yes, and what an unstable and cannibalistic system that is! That's why some of us prefer not to sell/go public, instead opting for stable albeit less income. As another comment said, I don't need a third house or car collection. My one house is plenty, and I'm already in a position most of the country can only dream about.
vel0city
"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
adeptima
this guy .....
Aurornis
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.
serial_dev
I am using their free product, IntelliJ CE (community edition). I simply couldn’t get used to VS code and its AI derivatives.
Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays for every engineers’ Cursor usage, can’t imagine how much it could cost, but they don’t have any encouraged integration with JetBrains… so while JetBrains products are good, I’m wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype pushing them to higher valuations
spullara
Augment has a great extension for jetbrains products. Much better than their AI tools (and better than cursor for large code bases).
0x1ceb00da
They have such a nice product! But every release comes with almost the same number of bugfixes and new bugs. I wish it was a more stable product and they were more cautious about adding new features. Every new feature comes with the risk of adding more bugs.
simion314
You have the option to not update in place. Download the new version and keep the old one too, then test the new version, if they broke your workflow go back to the old version until the bugs are fixed.
luckylion
I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to fight for a day to get rid of".
Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
bandoti
Honestly this is why I use emacs. Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.
My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse).
That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context.
Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.
raincole
> The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.
Which one?
Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
hiccuphippo
Funny, what sold me on AI was watching Andreas Kling work on SerenityOS/LadyBird using CLion and it giving some impressive suggestions.
betterThanTexas
Seems to work fine for me, I haven't noticed it getting in my way any more than any other assistant.
vital
Junie. I was immediately impressed.
killerstorm
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost 10 years, and I'm not impressed.
Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...
AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..
People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
rf15
There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds, and your AI problem... maybe it was really early right after release? Either way, contact their support.
And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.
I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.
Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.
Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.
foepys
Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.
Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
homebrewer
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.
hbn
But their founders ran off with a fat paycheck so the system worked as intended
asadm
Life is like that, some are more blessed than others in some metric. You gotta make your own lemonade.
nsonha
They're a great company but geopolitics is working against them.
Also AI should not be lumped together with literal fraud, that's lazy.
devmor
I believe that's why the comment author put "AI" in quotation marks. There's a massive amount of fraud around "AI" right now, as there always is in the startup scene with a hot new technology.
echelon
> geopolitics is working against them.
Do most people even know they're a Russian company? Do businesses decide not to invest for that reason?
bitwize
It's not us lumping AI together with fraud. It's the companies employing, for example, Actually Indians to do things they claim are done by machine. Or the ones marketing ChatGPT with various agentic hookups as a replacement for developers. Or...
bakugo
The hundreds of AI startups desperately trying to convince management that they can replace entire teams of skilled humans with AI are, by definition, a scam. Maybe a different type of scam than crypto rugpullers, but still a scam.
riku_iki
I (and many others) use LLM for coding tasks multiple times a day, its very unlikely they will go the way of NFTs.
lolinder
Most "AI" startups aren't building coding tools, and the utility of this tech goes down dramatically in industries that are less legible on the open internet than software is.
Eggpants
Then your “code” is riddled with bugs. Coding by Statistics will only end in tears.
giancarlostoro
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.
ternaryoperator
Programming languages are high-cost, low-revenue beasts. When Kotlin was first released, JB was hoping it would replace Java in the enterprise. And as the sole providers of Kotlin tools, they'd have a greatly expanded market.
Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it internally, etc.
We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
raincole
The irony is that there are a lot of "XYZ Native" solution, such as Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Xaramin, etc. But somehow only React Native, something based on a web framework, seems to reach the critical mass.
neonsunset
There are fundamental restrictions where NativeAOT will never work or be desirable. For example, runtime-compiled regex patterns or any other feature which relies on emitting IL at runtime and creating new members or even assembles and then loading them. Similar applies to compiled expression trees - they are supported in NativeAOT but in the form of falling back onto interpreting them, which has worse performance. Or unbound reflection with patterns that cannot be statically proven and/or analyzed.
Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are hard constraints - a correctly working expression like 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code which does exactly this.
The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI, EF Core has some compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a solved problem although you may need to use a different API.
At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go) and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which specifically exploit it but is also a performance optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations, and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases, usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).
The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower stems from other sources of performance overhead that are typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which have "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation itself. There are technicalities like certain calls have to be indirect in order to support patching the callee address, or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers/callees may be constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
lvass
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.
pacetherace
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.
karolist
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.
symlinkk
+1, the Remote SSH is horrible. Takes forever to connect and is extremely laggy once you have connected. Feels like they’re practically streaming video of the UI back to you instead of VSCode’s Remote SSH which feels indistinguishable from running locally.
hbn
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!
vishnugupta
They have this terrific plan where if you buy yearly subscription you will get the major version free for life even after you stop paying after one year.
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered it. Been using it since then for like 3-4 years now.
dardeaup
Not all of them. I believe it's IntelliJ, Rider, CLion and maybe 1 or 2 others. GoLand for example is not yet free for non-commercial use.
NoahKAndrews
It's CLion, Rider, RustRover, and WebStorm, IntelliJ is not on the list.
So far they haven't muddied the waters for any versions that already had free Community Editions (IntelliJ and PyCharm). The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
Defletter
> The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.
I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have the Educational licence when I was in university. What was there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have any the wiser?
rob74
> I'm super happy JetBrains has been opening up all their editors to offer free access for non-commercial use.
All? That would be news to me! From the 10 IDEs (not counting ReSharper, which iss a plugin vor Visual Studio) listed on https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/#choose-your-ide, only CLion, Rider, RustRover and WebStorm are free for non-commercial use. Plus, each of the products has its own free or discounted licenses for certain users (e.g. students).
lolinder
"Has been opening" is the present perfect continuous tense [0], which describes something that started in the past and is still ongoing. In TFA JetBrains says explicitly that this is a process that they intend to continue assuming it goes well.
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/present-perfect-conti...
NoboruWataya
I have been using PyCharm, IDEA and Android Studio for free for a while now. I'm not a student or any special category of user. I think you only get "core" features for free but they sure still among the most featureful IDEs that I have used.
mdaniel
I was curious about "for a while" and it is apparently 16 years (2009 commit with message "license.txt" https://github.com/Jetbrains/intellij-community/tree/4d9912f... ) and the PyCharm Apache 2 release seems to be a lot harder to actually track down but https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/commit/e0d02... is cited as "initial extraction of python-community module (for now with a few cyclic dependencies)" in 2013
hbn
Well, I said "has been," as in, in-the-process!
I'm not sure why the staggered rollout, maybe there's strategic reasons certain ones will never have a free non-commercial license. But so far they've been consistently opening them up one-by-one.
NoahKAndrews
It'll be interesting to see what they do for PyCharm and IntelliJ, which already have free Community Editions. Long term, I doubt they'll want to have two types of free version that restrict usage in completely different ways, but if they kill the Community Editions, anyone using them for commercial use will have to either build from source (hopefully the end of community editions wouldn't mean the end of the open source parts), start paying, or switch to an alternative.
I'm making zero predictions about what they'll do, there's a lot of ways it could go.
jackwilsdon
There are community editions of IDEA and PyCharm which are free for commercial use too.
wing-_-nuts
Right, but goland, and importantly the go plugin for intellij are both not free, which is a bummer
geophile
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.
mdaniel
I was expecting you to end with "and don't squander the amazing track record of developer goodwill you have accumulated by forcing the stupid-ass 'New UI' on us, or telling us that we're committing code wrong, or somehow suddenly trying to go 'All AI' or whatever"
I'll be straight: for me personally there is no replacement, and I'll just patch the "unsupported" Commit Like a Sane Person plugin[1] indefinitely if I have to, but ... come on, don't strain our relationship like that
1: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26647-modal-commit-inte...
the__alchemist
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!
ackfoobar
> ... RustRover: By far the best code editors ...
I'm using RustRover. It's pretty lame compared to the IntelliJ experience. "Find usages" does not separate test code and application code; "copy reference" gets me the file name and line number instead of the fully qualified name.
I'd probably use vscode/cursor fully if I weren't so used to the JetBrains environment.
winrid
That's insane, I use webstorm, pycharm, and Intellij, sometimes all at the same time, on a mobile 8th gen i7, it doesn't lock up. The single thread passmark score is literally half your cpu! :D
winrid
Although I guess none of those projects are more than 150k loc.
trallnag
Are you experiencing these problems on your personal device or is it a corporate provided one full of scanners? IntelliJ is definitely slower on my work laptop compared to my private desktop. Might also be due to the larger project size and heavy usage of Spring, though
sensanaty
I have my work project loaded on my home PC, and to be fair it's a beast of a PC, but still it's insane how much power is wasted on the work macbook from the stupid MDM software running on it. It feels blazing fast on my PC, and the slowness is unbearable sometimes on the work laptop.
the__alchemist
Various personal devices over time.
inetknght
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. :)
nsm
Jdk improvements and the new Nova/Rider backend how dramatically improved JetBrains performance. I highly encourage you to give it another shot.
riquito
> > 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.
How's that "basically true"? That's false. You can opt out. In fact there's very good documentation around that
hyper57
According to Microsoft's own license terms for VS Code, you can't opt out of all telemetry; see Section 2a: https://code.visualstudio.com/license
> You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di....
Also, each extension (including Microsoft's) may collect its own telemetry. The blog post https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry has more details.
Personally, I think it's a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting telemetry in their free products when Microsoft do the same in VS Code with hardly anyone voicing the same level of criticism for it.
voidspark
> a shame that JetBrains get such flack for collecting telemetry in their free products
Probably 99.99% of developers don’t care.
The ones who complain about it online are a tiny vocal minority.
voidspark
The CLion language engine was completely rewritten since then.
discmonkey
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.
ainiriand
RustRover is already free for Non-Commercial use! I think it is the best IDE for Rust dev.
weinzierl
Yes, it is quite nice. That being said I keep a little statistic about IDE usage at the Rust events I attend. I have observed RustRover or CLion only three times at the 48 events I've recorded. One of these three was an event at JetBrains. To be fair, I started my notes long before RustRover existed.
neovim is marginally more popular.
vscode is the crushing majority.
toprerules
[flagged]
rafram
Using "Java-based" as a smear is pretty silly. The IntelliJ platform is an extremely solid piece of software, clunkiness and all. It does everything pretty well, with very little need for config fiddling or third-party plugins.
redserk
First-party LSPs are great and all but some form of text editor is also at least marginally useful for writing code.
wing-_-nuts
I got 'lazyvim' (a neovim distro) up and running, installed LSPs for my languages of choice (mostly java and go) and it seems like a completely broken experience to me. I don't even get any error messages telling me anything is wrong, it just doesn't work.
discmonkey
You may not be able to think of a worse experience, but a lot of "newer" programmers may not even know what an LSP is. While it's true that I no longer need to rely on some of the benefits of Jetbrains, when I was getting started jetbrains paving over toolchain difficulties was invaluable.
panstromek
Those were both build by some of the same people and they also share some code so it's a bit of a weird comparison.
umanwizard
FYI the same guy wrote both.
1over137
Free version sends telemetry with no opt-out.
pasoevi
You can still use paid version if you want to turn telemetry off. With the free version, you can either use it and say thanks, or not use it at all.
badsectoracula
Indeed, this is one of the various options one has.
Another option is to not use it and be vocal against telemetry, hopefully convincing others to do the same while dissuading other developers (especially in a forum like Hacker News where people that build stuff gather) from adding it on their products.
unclad5968
Genuine question. Why do you care if other people agree with you about telemetry? I almost always enable telemetry on anything I don't believe will serve me ads.
pasoevi
I wouldn't take people seriously who are vocal against telemetry in a product which has paid version with the option to turn telemetry off. Such people would be vocal against paying for the work others do. Also, if properly anonymised, telemetry isn't the devil people make it to be.
ndriscoll
It's nonetheless useful for people to warn others about spyware. You can find the tradeoff acceptable (or be willing/able to put the necessary isolation in place) while thanking the other commenter for the heads up.
chrsw
I wasn't aware they were using telemetry in the free versions until this thread. Why I didn't just assume that a free service or product offered by a for-profit company isn't doing _something_ to extract value is beyond me.
blibble
facebook were certainly slapped down for attempting "consent or pay"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay
"anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
sofixa
> anonymised" data is often extremely easy to de-anonymise
If it's location data, yes. If it's your IDE usage stats (plugins, file types, whatever), not really.
KronisLV
Compared to most UI dark patterns and scummy tactics to get you to "consent" (actually tricking you into agreeing, because nobody can't be bothered to jump through like a bunch of legalese and dialogs), them just giving you that choice of straight up paying feels better.
Not really interested in their services, but at least that sort of payment would let me expect less trickery in the future.
> Critics of this consent model have called it "pay-or-okay", claiming that the monthly fee is disproportional and that users are not able to withdraw their consent to tracking as easily as it is given, which the GDPR requires. Massimiliano Gelmi, a data protection lawyer at NOYB, has stated that "The law is clear, withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it in the first place. It is painfully obvious that paying €251,88 per year to withdraw consent is not as easy as clicking an 'Okay' button to accept the tracking."
Under this model, you'd just have to refuse service to everyone who doesn't pay (killing your platform) or let people partake in your platform with no revenue off of them (killing your platform). Neither seems reasonable from the perspective of that business? Are they just supposed to find other ways of monetizing their users or perish then?
riquito
Not that people are obligated to use IntelliJ IDEs, but it's sad that it boils down to "You can have privacy if you can afford it". But admittedly is better to have the option to use it than not being able to use it at all
atemerev
Their telemetry promises not to collect private data. Yes, your code will probably used for training their models. But so it would be if you publish it on GitHub.
Someone
So, they’re contradicting themselves, saying both (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/05/clion-is-now-free-f...)
“With the new non-commercial license type, you can enjoy a full-featured IDE that is identical to its paid version. The only difference is in the Code With Me feature – you get Code With Me Community with your free license.”
and (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/05/clion-is-now-free-f...)
“We appreciate that this might not be convenient for everyone, but there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending anonymized statistics to JetBrains under the terms of the Toolbox agreement for non-commercial use. The only way to opt out is by switching to either a paid subscription or one of the complimentary options mentioned here.”
Also, if they find that unfortunate, why did they make the product do that?
codedokode
> there is unfortunately no way to opt out of sending anonymized statistics
There is a way - simply use an open source alternative to JetBrains.
pjmlp
There is your price right there.
bayindirh
Yes, that one is a real bummer, actually, but if they're using something like how Go does it [0], at least it's tolerable if you're bound to using it.
ainiriand
Can you give us proof of that? I have not seen anything like that in my RustRover usage but it might be that I have missed that.
dardeaup
From the link: "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."
hiq
It's in the article:
> 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.
pacman1337
couldn't we just block the traffic with /etc/hosts?
enigma101
just use a firewall, no?
lern_too_spel
They're probably using the telemetry to monitor commercial abuse.
anastasiak2512
The telemetry is used to analyzed the most used / unused features and to improve the product. For example, it's useful to understand that some specific technology gains more popularity among users and contribute more into its support.
lern_too_spel
I have no doubt that this is the primary use. It was the only way to use that data until now. Now that there is a free offering, there is a new potential use that neatly explains why it is required in the free offering and optional otherwise.
perrygeo
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.
ivanjermakov
Huge benefit of current rise of "C++ killer" languages is that they're designed with LSP support from day 1. I had a great experience with Rust and rust_analyzer: open any project in LSP-capable editor and it just works.
DidYaWipe
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?
pasoevi
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?
matheusmoreira
[flagged]
pasoevi
You aren't a product? Then pay for the products you use instead of asking to get it for free. If they don't give you the option to turn telemetry off in the paid product, then go ahead and complain. But pay for what you get.
matheusmoreira
? No one asked them to release their software for free. They did it of their own accord.
They don't get to subtly mine value out of their users just because they released free stuff. That's nonsense. We're not obligated to be guinea pigs in their usability experiments.
ymolodtsov
I can almost guarantee you are not able to provide a single example where this or any other company hurt you by "using your data"
You're acting like if them knowing what features you use amounts to Stazi looking over your private life.
matheusmoreira
You're acting like they're gonna go out of business if they can't get their little statistics. Come on now.
There is absolutely no need for me to "prove" anything to anyone. No need whatsoever. It is my computer, and I have decided. It's as simple as that.
Why? Because I don't want it to happen. That's all there is to it. Couldn't care less what their motivations are. Couldn't care less how "justified" they are. I simply do not want data of any kind to be compiled and exfiltrated to anyone for any reason whatsoever, unless I explicitly command my computer to it.
wiseowise
They have a shortcut for this, actually. CMD + Q.
badsectoracula
Because these two are completely separate things.
pasoevi
How?
badsectoracula
See my reply to the other comment you made[0] where you basically say the same thing.
ndriscoll
Same reason responsible technologists warned less-informed users about installing BonziBuddy. It was a free product that told jokes or whatever just as it said it would. It was also spyware.
Responsible technologists should raise the alarm on spyware products because they are harmful toward their users. Malware is often given away for "free" (sometimes even sent to you without you asking!), so it doesn't really make sense to say "well that's the deal". Somehow people seem to be forgetting this over the years (I suspect because a lot more technologists make money from participating in the surveillance/malware economy these days, and it's gotten so bad that some of them have started to think malware distribution and exfiltrating (and often selling) user data is not a thoroughly black-hat activity).
If you're okay with adware or spyware or crypto miners or botnet proxies or whatever else running on your computer as a form of "payment", great. You consider that a reasonable "transaction". Other people appreciate being warned about such behavior. In any case, one shouldn't consider the product to be "free" as advertised.
missinglugnut
Having a checkbox that says "opt out of usage statistics" doesn't protect anyone against malware. Downloading from trusted counterparties does.
ndriscoll
Gathering user consent is what makes the difference between malware and not. If you click "Yes, upload this crash report" or "Yes, upload stats on what buttons I click", that's the program acting according to your wishes. If the program gathers and transmits that data without you asking or reviewing it and against your wishes, that's malware (i.e. malicious software that causes the computer to undermine its owner). Basically, does the computer obey the owner or not?
taylorallred
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!
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.