I'm not sure how performance is a problem for Intellij. Granted, I've only ever used Pycharm but I've never felt it sluggish or "slow" or got the impression I was waiting around for the IDE to do its thing. All this on a 2013 MBP with 16GB of RAM.

I've found it also works very well on Linux on a laptop with a i5-8250U and 16 GB of RAM.

The only thing that seems "slow" is starting up and indexing libraries and whatnot. Now I've never loaded the same projects in VSCode, but I'm not sure indexing would be that much faster and the startup doesn't really bother me, as I don't launch it multiple times a day.

I've been a JetBrains user for about a decade now (intelliJ/RubyMine/PHPStorm) and for general editing you really don't notice the performance issues at first. But if you leave it running long enough or you make use of features that lean heavily on indexing like code inspections on large codebases or language level inspections as a couple of examples it will chew through memory like crazy and drag a machine down that's newer and higher spec'ed than you've listed.

That said, given everything it provides I don't think there is a better tool for the job despite the performance issues.

IntelliJ performs poorly if you have a many-module project with multiple independent `pom.xml` or gradle files on that Mac config you described. It does require tuning in this scenario to ensure that its Maven and Gradle imports do not fail and leave you unable to resolve your types. If you have a generate-source step you're going to be in even more trouble.

Would VSCode work better in this scenario? I'm not familiar with Java tooling, so my question is whether this is a tooling problem or an IntelliJ problem.

VSCode lacks many of IntelliJ's features so it would act as a text-editor with naive auto-complete better. With plugins and presumably an LSP link, you can get some degree of functionality but it does not compare in total.

I would not write Java anywhere but IntelliJ. Any long time IntelliJ+Java user has macros and templates written so that boilerplate is automatic. `psvm` is built-in, as is `sout`, but when I wrote a lot of Java I had ones for other common patterns at my workplace.

You may change your mind if you plug your MBP into an external 4K display and try to use a scaled resolution: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526 — don't get me wrong, I love PyCharm too for all the reasons spoken about in this thread, but this issue (which has been open for five years now) has made me attempt to jump ship to VSCode for my python work several times. I _do_ always come back to PyCharm... so far...

This is completely not restricted to IntelliJ/PyCharm.

The MBP i7 is terrible for this, and I get thermal throttling all the time when I use 4k external screens and anything remotely that seems like work.

OK, but (for example) my experience is that I only experience this as a problem with PyCharm — it literally becomes unusable; VSCode (say) is fine.

Depends on the plugin that gets activated. Jest can bring it to its knees.

... because of rendering/scaling/4K? Or just anyway?

What's the reason for using a scaled resolution btw? Can't you just ramp up the font size in the IDE?

It looks like maybe a macOS issue as Windows/Linux don't have the same problem, but there's a port of Java to Apple's proprietary Metal API in progress for some time. It's possible that will fix it.

Yes, as it happens you can in PyCharm; in many other apps I use that's not the case, however. I've got used to running at full 4K but TBH sometimes I worry about eye strain.

I often use a 24" 4k display that I use at 2x and I never had any issue. With other "equivalent" resolutions it may be bad (never tried) but I've heard people complain about lag in that situation (even with a newer MBP and apps other than intellij).

I am running it most of the time with i7-8750H and also 64G or ram, plus a rather fast NVMe drive. Performance in comparison with VSCode is just bad. That being said I am using all JetBrain products (I have a license for all of them), because simply there is nothing better for my use case. But I wish they put some effort in optimising their code.

Sorry to hear that. Is that a mobile processor? Perhaps you're throttling. I boost RAM on my IntelliJ quite high (I give it like 8 gigs plus a gig each for each of the tools - Maven, Gradle, etc.). Your setup looks better than mine except for the fact that its mobile.