The Road to Responsive IntelliJ-Based IDEs | The JetBrains Platform Blog

Efforts to improve the UI responsiveness of IntelliJ-based IDEs have been ongoing for several years, aiming to address performance issues tied to the platform's architectural constraints. The initiative focuses on moving performance-sensitive tasks away from the UI thread to minimize the time it holds the write lock, which has been a significant source of UI freezes due to its entanglement with read actions. This transition, which began in 2019, involves implementing background write actions without disrupting existing plugin compatibility or the modal dialog functionality within the IDE. Despite challenges such as the need for a new lock mechanism and maintaining compatibility with legacy code, the project has seen progress, notably in reducing the time the event dispatch thread (EDT) spends executing write actions. The effort continues with further plans to remove lock acquisition from the EDT to enhance the responsiveness of common user interactions while maintaining consistency and compatibility across the platform.