Project Rider - New resharper-based IDE

cartman82

Oct 4, 2021 / How-To's

Project Rider — C# IDE | The .NET Tools Blog

UPDATE: NDC London organizers have kindly uploaded the recording of Project Rider presentation. Enjoy! UPDATE 2: Make sure to follow Project Rider on twitter to receive further updates promptly.

So JetBrains are trying to free their Resharper project from the carcass of Visual Studio, and integrate it into their IntelliJ IDE architecture.

But isn't resharper made in .NET and their cross platform architecture based on JVM? Boy that sure sounds like a lot of work!

Well that's what they thought too.

###How does it work?

Project Rider is a standalone IDE built on the IntelliJ Platform, much like WebStorm, DataGrip and our other IDEs.

The difference however, is that instead of reimplementing ReSharper’s features on the IntellIJ Platform, which runs on the JVM, we’re using ReSharper in a headless mode, out of process, and communicating with it via a very fast custom binary protocol. As such, the backend continues to be ReSharper written in C# running on .NET or Mono, and the frontend is written in Kotlin, talking to the IntelliJ Platform’s APIs.

We’ll take a more in-depth look at the implementation details in a future blog post.

What's better than picking one heavy weight batteries included framework and sticking with it?

Picking two.

PJH

@cartman82 said:

> a very fast custom binary protocol

Ò_o

RaceProUK

@cartman82 said:

So JetBrains are trying to free their Resharper project from the carcass of Visual Studio

*wonders if that has anything to do with the fact that an increasing number of ReSharper features are now part of VS itself*

cartman82

@RaceProUK said:

wonders if that has anything to do with the fact that an increasing number of ReSharper features are now part of VS itself

Shhhhh... I'm hunting wabits.

Maciejasjmj

Nice onebox, Discourse.

Onyx

Better than my attempts, it seems that they managed to get Discourse to read some of their parameters besides the title at least.

NedFodder

@PJH said:

@cartman82 said:
> a very fast custom binary protocol

Ò_o

Is that just a fancy way of saying "not XML or JSON"?

ChrisH

It's probably JSONX. Gzipped.

PJH

@NedFodder said:

Is that just a fancy way of saying "not just plain XML or JSON"?

Possibly closer to the truth.

LB_

What exactly is a "very fast _____ protocol" supposed to mean when it's just standard IPC? The ping is 0! How could you even make it slow without trying!?

Matches

I've played with ipc for unity game programming, where basically I create an out of process bridge for .net 35 mono to 46 normal, mostly because of features I wanted.

It's not hard, and really fast (at least locally over named pipes) so...

Filed under: feasible?

I suspect this is a proactive step for all those new Roslyn ide to be able to use resharper (ie: if Google or IBM switches?)

Or maybe they are just trying to justify their team size.

Also, when I reinstalled vs 2013 ultimate, the only reason I realized I forgot resharper was class colors and the fact that vs wouldn't auto import using statements without me clicking extra buttons.

But that's why I still have resharper, is the auto import of classes.

Matches

Going out of process and back will have a non zero overhead, but the exact amount should be something you wouldn't even notice while typing.

sloosecannon

@Matches said:

should be

And there's the catch

Judging by how slow ReSharper, IntelliJ, and VS can get..... well.... I wouldn't bet on it.

I'm surprised they're not just re-using the IntelliJ engine and tweaking it a little to work with a different language. Like WebStorm, PHPStorm, Clion, 0xDBE, etc.

blakeyrat

ReSharper is fucking awful. I think it's solely responsible for everybody who thinks Visual Studio is slow bloated shit.

I actually have it installed because my boss was adamant, but I keep it turned off. He's ok with that now after we did a "race" of how quickly VS' test runner could run our unit tests compared to ReSharper's. (Hint: VS is 3 TIMES faster.)

Magus

Seems to be a good range of opinions on the thing. I really like their intellisense and refactorings, but I hate all the dialogs they pull up. I don't use their test runner despite it having some nice hierarchy modes mostly because NCrunch is infinitely better. I do like the extra color options a lot, and hope Microsoft implements more of them.

But plenty of people believe that it will cause the universe to implode and cripple VS to unusable speeds, and they aren't correct either at this point, though I fully believe that they were in the past.

sloosecannon

@Magus said:

intellisense and refactorings

Yeah, JetBrains is really good at doing that.

I honestly think this IDE could be really good, but I'm afraid by doing this process link thing it will be just as slow as VS+ReSharper without the added benefits of VS+ReSharper.

Magus

All it has to be is more usable than Xamarin Studio. Seriously, that thing was awesome back when it was Monodevelop, and now I hate everything about it. If I can have an actual good C# IDE on Windows and Linux, I'll be happy.

But I wouldn't be at all shocked if it was slow. Which would admittedly be rather tragic.

blakeyrat

@Magus said:

But plenty of people believe that it will cause the universe to implode and cripple VS to unusable speeds, and they aren't correct either at this point, though I fully believe that they were in the past.

Here's the deal.

As a person who never tried ReSharper until recently, I was curious about it but not willing to pay for a license. So I'd ask, "what's so good about it?" And they'd say, "it has a key combo you can use to instantly search for any method/class", and I'd say, "stock VS does that, try again," and they'd say, "well it automatically adds using statements based on what you've typed," and I'd say "well stock VS does that, try again." And then they'd cry.

When I actually got a (work comped) license for ReSharper, I found out: my suspicions were right. It doesn't seem to do anything stock VS doesn't already do. And in most cases, significantly better. It does however make VS so slow that there's a noticeable lag in your typing, and draw really really ugly jaggy boxes and lines all the fuck over (and it's not like VS started out beautiful), and make contextual menus take about 57 times longer to appear.

So I started disabling features about it that annoyed me and after about 2 weeks, for all practical purposes, I wasn't running it at all. (But it was still causing a HUGE performance hit.) So I turned it off entirely and waited for a co-worker to call me on it, but none ever did, so it's still off to this day.

ReSharper might have been a worthwhile product at some point in history, but it hasn't been for a long, long time. I think all their sales now come from stupid company policies, and people who buy it purely out of habit.

sloosecannon

@Magus said:

But I wouldn't be at all shocked if it was slow. Which would admittedly be rather tragic.

Yeah.

IntelliJ (it's the heaviest of the IDE families there, since it can basically do everything the others can too) can be slow, especially on load or on a non-SSD drive, but it generally is pretty fast after it's done indexing everything.

izzion

Technically, that's not Discourse's fault.

You're visiting this site on HTTPS, and that one-box link is HTTP. But Chrome has stopped bugging / notifying you about that, so you just figure it's broken. Because letting users know when you're breaking their page is TR