Posted by kretaceous 3 days ago
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.
I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.
Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.
I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.
For example, I'm using VS Code to work on a back-end based on Deno, which has a plug-in for VS Code. Would I find Rider a less-hospitable development environment?
Like VS, Rider will also do C++. In fact, CLion (their purpose built C++ IDE) is now running on Rider's backend. I'm sure that makes Rider very powerful for C++, but I haven't really tried.
Rider is bar none the best IDE I've used and I've been subscribed for six or seven years now.
As far as C++ goes, I wonder (based on the info you've provided) what CLion offers that Rider doesn't.
What are the most compelling reasons to switch? I have heard lots of praise but little substance so far.
For .NET dev it seems hard for any IDE to rival VS Studio's tight integration with the whole MS + .NET ecosystem.
Sadly this has changed: JetBrains does not seem to care very much about F# these days, and Rider has similar bugs to what Visual Studio had in 2016-2020. It is a bad option for F# developers.
On very large solutions I've found VS to be completely unusable.
Is it objectively (significantly) more performant?
How does the MAUI app development experience compare?
Code completion?
IIS-integration?
Debugging?
Look and feel?
WPF / XAML designer?
File explorer?
Git integration?
...
You might like the built in code completions, with the included local LLM. If you've used the Resharper plugin for Visual Studio, you might like that those features come included in Rider. Same with DotPeek, if you like to decompile dependencies to view implementation details. You might also like Rider's built in 3 way merge with magic wand to auto resolve easy conflicts.
If you also develop outside dotnet ecosystem, you might like that Rider has the same UI as Idea (java development) and Webstorm (frontend development), so switching between them is more familiar.
One thing I don't like about Rider is its inline type hints. I think they clutter the code and I usually disable them.
I haven't gone back to Visual Studio in a while, so I can't offer an honest comparison since my experience is a bit outdated.
(But to be honest, I don't really use Rider too much nowadays either. I've mostly switched to VSCode. So take this with a grain of salt. And apologies I didn't address the items you listed. I just wanted to point out the items I personally took note of)
Regarding your points:
> MAUI
No personal experience yet unfortunately on my part
> Code completion
At least on par, basically ReSharper with a few extras. Navigation and refactoring is great and comprehensive.
> IIS
Also no personal experience
> Debugging
Great debugger IMHO. Matches VS, predictive debugging is nice (deemphasizes branches it knows won't run), breakpoint conditions are great (only break on a certain thread, after another breakpoint had been hit, after n hits, ...), shows return values in the watch list automatically, etc.
> Look & feel
Probably personal preference: I prefer its more modern and focused look over VS. If you're into that, its Vim emulation plugin is superb.
> WPF
Not its strong suit. VS is way better here. Rider only has a preview. Annoying: it doesn't use themes for DevExpress-libraries correctly in one project at work.
> file explorer
Pretty much like VS
> Git integration
In my experience nicer than in VS. Exposes git's features more easily than VS. Take it with a grain of salt because I use the CLI mostly anyway.
I hope this helps a bit. But you're probably better off trying it for a while if you can.