Yet another Hacker News

OpenIDEA: The IDE you know, rebuilt in Rust

33 points theanonymousone 2 hours ago 36 comments

Betelbuddy 1 hour ago | parent

So that I understand...

I guess the logic here is: If I love this project, I should renew my JetBrains subscription...so that they can keep having money to fix bugs in their IDE...so that you can keep reverse engineering it?

Am I seeing this right?

rustyhancock 1 hour ago | parent

The Readme has that first pass vibe coded feel.

Which isn't the vibe I want from my editor.

I know this exact comment is probably becoming tedious on HN, but it's very rare that a tool I pay for is so bad I'll jump ship for 0.1.0 alpha if a clone.

Long story short, I'm keeping my sub.

imtringued 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, you still have to pay Jetbrains to release their prompt.

jarym 1 hour ago | parent

2025 was all about 'Rust' on HN and 2026 is all about 'rebuilding everything in Rust'. Comical on one level and yet intriguing.

philipallstar 55 minutes ago | parent

The low-effort metacommentary on what all of HN is supposedly doing or saying is what 2026 HN is really about.

Black616Angel 1 hour ago | parent

"rebuilt in Rust"

looks inside

60% Typescript

Yeah, didn't think so...

Deukhoofd 57 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, it's a Tauri app, which makes the claim in the README about it being a native app also rather a lie.

Did Tauri ever figure out how to run performantly on Linux, or are they still using webkit2gtk? They were looking at integrating Servo last time I checked, but I have no clue how far they've progressed with that since.

bendowlingdev 48 minutes ago | parent

I dont think the author knows what either of those things are. The whole thing is vibed.

aenis 38 minutes ago | parent

Which is ironic. Why would a vibe coder need an IDE anyway?

boredstranger 35 minutes ago | parent

Things like these make me question the provided benchmarks too

Stitch4223 25 minutes ago | parent

This ticket tries to explain it: https://github.com/l0ng-ai/openidea/issues/568

Building consistent frontends for all platforms isn’t easy in rust, so they use web standards for that.

outloudvi 1 hour ago | parent

Sorry if I'm wrong, but does people pay for JetBrains product subscriptions not for a continuously maintained IDE, but for a Rust-based IDE?

alex_smart 1 hour ago | parent

How is this not a trademark infringement?

prmoustache 50 minutes ago | parent

well, it is not called intellij idea for a start.

If you do a lookup at WIPO brands database you can find "intellij" and "intellij idea" owned by Jetbrains s.r.o. but not "idea" alone.

Based on this only a judge can decide if it is close enough to be an infringement and could misled customers. Given the readme days eplicitely says it is not the same IDE as Intellij IDEA I would say it would be hard to convince someone customers are misled.

exceptione 59 minutes ago | parent

Interesting project. It seems it uses CodeMirror [1] in the Tauri frontend (60% of total code is typescript), but uses rust in the backend (30%). Surprising to see that Tauri is apparently good enough for the three platforms it needs to support (or it uses a lot of hacks, I don't know). The advertised memory reduction is remarkable as I expected a full web view to be a bit memory heavy. Not sure how this IDE keeps up with large documents or a lot of opened views though.

___

1. The editor implementation is here: <https://github.com/l0ng-ai/openidea/blob/main/src/editor/cor...>

ThouYS 41 minutes ago | parent

vibed a tauri app the other day ~60MB RAM usage. quite happy with that!

ChocolateGod 32 minutes ago | parent

Tauri on Linux is horrible, but that's due to the poor state of WebKitGTK than Tauris fault.

mqus 58 minutes ago | parent

From the promo video:

> completion from language servers

That's exactly the thing that I like about idea: It's better than that.

jttnr 51 minutes ago | parent

That is exactly what I value in IDEA. Language server integration offers the same level of completion and functionality in all other editors, too.

IDEA is much smarter than what a language server alone offers.

neutronicus 34 minutes ago | parent

It’s also presumably where some of the memory is going

ReDress 57 minutes ago | parent

Looks like Qt Creator after all.

I bet it's a lot of fun being a Rust programmer / coder.

armchairhacker 52 minutes ago | parent

They should’ve copied the classic UI.

borzi 43 minutes ago | parent

The only value adding vibe coded software I've used so far has been clones of existing software that can then be used for free since now it's in a legal greyzone and you can pretend it's not piracy...all thanks to subsidized subscriptions enabled by companies who are in part the publishers of the software that is being cloned. What a time to be alive...

devnull3 43 minutes ago | parent

Where Rust scores over Go is not so much on the speed but memory usage. As memory is becoming expensive (and likely to stay for sometime), the appeal for Rust increases.

The large disk space usage for Rust is much more solvable than speed-up in Rust compilation as long as crate remains the lowest compilation unit.

Barring this, even for AI based development Golang is much better language. But Rust's long term payoff is too good at this point.

pjmlp 35 minutes ago | parent

I rather go with vibe coded machine language, YOLO! /s

ramon156 39 minutes ago | parent

Just use Zed.

getnormality 35 minutes ago | parent

How did Hacker News become the place where you announce a hack and all the comments are like "I don't like this because I feel it might be in a legal gray area"?

Stitch4223 31 minutes ago | parent

It didn’t, there are a few (shallow) replies which are downvoted to the bottom of the page. But perhaps when you looked at the page these comments were new and you were just unlucky.

The discussion about IP with these reverse engineered products in itself is interesting, although a bit repetitive with new clones every day.

atrokhymchuk 35 minutes ago | parent

why do we even need the rebuilt? idea is already opensource[0].

In the benchmark[1] the cpu, memory and quit time (!) are compared, but does it makes any sense without feature parity?

[0]: https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community

[1]: https://github.com/l0ng-ai/openidea#benchmark

zb3 27 minutes ago | parent

It does, because one might not use all the features while still paying performance cost.

pjmlp 34 minutes ago | parent

Uses Typescript for the most part, not much better than Electron stuff, cannot use the InteliJ plugins powered by the JVM, it is vibe coded, no thanks.

andai 8 minutes ago | parent

>vibe coded, no thanks

I hear this a lot, the argument usually being "they didn't care to put effort into it, so it probably won't be maintained.

That's a reasonable assumption. It's basically the Lindy effect: The longer something has existed, the longer it probably will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

But maybe a Lindy effect measuring effort rather than time (as a signal of commitment). Git commits no longer mean effort since the computer can just make commits on its own.

Still, if I saw a vibe coded project and the guy had been maintaining it for ten years (someday!), that gives a different feeling.

bihevi0 32 minutes ago | parent

So it’s main selling point is being IDEA clone…but in Rust?

vrotaru 31 minutes ago | parent

There is a (Bertrand Russell?) quote about axiomatic approach having the same advantages as theft compared to honest work.

I'm not sure exactly why this came to mind. Vibes?

avallach 27 minutes ago | parent

Calling it "OpenIDEA" is a bit misleading. IntellijIDEA is free and open source (Apache 2.0) since 2009. Paid subscription basically gives you extra plugins. And as others pointed out, saying that it was rebuilt in Rust is at least as much misleading: the code processing is still standalone LSP processes, frontend is WebView with typescript, only Tauri glue code is Rust. And that in turn makes me extremely skeptical about claimed memory usage! Consider that you must compare idea.exe against combo of WebView (on windows: chromium edge) + LSP (for Java, likely Eclipse LSP, at least that's what VSCode traditionally uses for Java). Is it realistic to fit that in claimed 169 MB?

pcblues 22 minutes ago | parent

Eclipse was an ide that needed a supercomputer to run on an early version of Java when it first came out.

It was interesting, but sluggish.

Jetbrains took advantage of it for profit and eventually adobe'd the business model, although granted they made a lot of improvements for various languages.

I have no pity for companies who made money off open source and lose it the same way. But this looks like a fight between fighters past their prime.