both Kotlin and C++ do interesting things with change signature, and they sometimes interfere with each other. and we don’t see this because we don’t have the C++ plugin installed in our testing environment

here's the issue

I guess IntelliJ needs more internal hooks/APIs to help the plugins not interfere with each other

Android Studio appears to be showing an editor color differently than it’s preview.

(2.0)

ah, nevermind.

turns out Android Studio has some different default Java styling than IntelliJ. Setting it to use the default value (in this case for Static final variables) fixed my issue 😃

btw, what's the plan for intellij upgrades now that it's gone subscription? will the pace be any different or will there still be a one year wait between major releases?

i mean does the old versioning scheme even make sense now. or maybe something more like Chrome would be better.

there are enough APIs, they just need to be used correctly simple smile

so far we have no plans to change to Chrome-like versioning. for a browser, you usually don’t notice any changes after an upgrade, and for an IDE that’s definitely not the case

and we don’t want to disrupt people’s development environments every six weeks

well, the Chrome team don't want to disrupt people's browsers every six weeks either. but they manage to make it work. they just make sure to run experiments, and enable people to temporarily turn off UI changes if they happen at a bad time, etc

for any IDE team, getting to the point where people would not hesitate to install IDE upgrades as soon as they come out would require a lot of effort and a lot of user trust

and it’s not obvious for me that it’s a desirable goal at all

interesting

i used to work at google. quite a few teams there had big pushes to get automated testing and quality to the level where they could release every week

the idea being, if you release every week, you can quickly run experiments, gather metrics, etc, and as web apps don't expose their version to the user anyway, you do PR around feature launches rather than bundle them all up into e.g. "Gmail 21"

the assumption was that rapid iteration would boost product quality

@mikehearn: Not as easy to pull off for GUI apps as it is for back end

both Chrome and GMail have a user interface

But the UI changes are rare in GMail. When gmail has a non-trivial change they usually show some sort of opt-out/opt-in dialogue. That is more or less the same as versioning.

And the UI for chrome almost never changes. Rendering of content changes but that is another story. The functionality is essentially the same release to release.

Right. The interaction level is not the same. And Google is much more aggressive with weekly releases for non-user facing changes than GUI changes

There's UI changes in Inbox all the time and I notice changed in Chrome updates constantly (especially dev tools)

Also keep in mind that both Chrome and Gmail are free products. People are willing to experience significant pain to continue using their free products.

With GUI, it’s not just that it’s easier to break and harder to test, it’s also very easy to immediately piss off hundreds of thousands of users.

Intellij is a pay-for product. And Developers are extraordinarily fickle when it comes to products they pay for

that is irrelevant to their ability to ship frequently