Livestream: UI Freezes in JetBrains IDE Plugins and How to Avoid Them | The JetBrains Platform Blog

UI freezes in JetBrains IDE plugins present significant challenges for developers, often stemming from complex concurrent programming issues rather than just heavy work on the event dispatch thread. In an upcoming livestream on March 19, Yuriy Artamonov, Product Manager for the IntelliJ Platform, and Patrick Scheibe, IntelliJ Platform Developer Advocate, will address these issues by exploring common causes and offering practical strategies to prevent them. The session will cover problems like long-running non-cancellable read actions, network calls during read locks, and the misuse of external processes, while also providing insights into why APIs such as ReadAction.compute can block write actions, causing UI freezes even when not running on the event dispatch thread. Attendees will learn how to write freeze-safe, cancellable plugin code to maintain the responsiveness of JetBrains IDEs, and a live Q&A will offer further opportunities to discuss real-world scenarios with experts. This session is valuable for both new and experienced plugin developers looking to mitigate UI freeze issues and enhance their coding practices.