#83: Ruby IDE/Editor Deathmatch

[Preston Lee]

Roundtable discussion on Ruby IDEs and text editors.
Runtime: 38:39 minutes.
Participants: Marc Chung, Preston Lee, Saul Mora, Benjamin Smith.
Episode Sponsor: http://openrain.com

Stream via the web from http://rubyology.com or subscribe via iTunes.


Direct download size: ~34MB M4A, ~74MB MP3
http://rubyology.s3.amazonaws.com/rubyology-83-high.m4a
http://rubyology.s3.amazonaws.com/rubyology-83-high.mp3

[Marcus Brito]

Great podcast guys.

But really, you need to take a deeper look into RubyMine. A lot of the
things you said you want is right there. Of course, it's not even
close to what we have available for Java, but it's definitely more
than just the basics.

Other than the basic rename/move/copy, RM already has the extract
method and introduce variable refactorings, plus pull/push members
(move methods/vars up or down the class hierarchy).

Static code analysis is also there. There are about 15 or 20 ruby
specific inspections, plus like 50 or so for JavaScript (funny that),
and a few spotting common problems or mistakes for XML, HTML and even
CSS. Sure, there's a lot of ground to cover but there are some great
gems like detecting jump errors, unreachable code, unused local
variables and wrong hash arguments.

While I don't think RM will ever have as many refactorings and
inspections as IDEA, I do believe it could come very close in
usefulness. The JetBrains guys are already doing things I didn't thing
was feasible with a language as dynamic as Ruby, like their type
infering inspection and a few others, and new features are being added
at a very fast pace.

Oh well, I guess that's enough talk. I'm not in any way affiliated to
JetBrains, BTW — just a very, very happy user.

-- Marcus Brito

[Saul Mora]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the feedback!

I have to admit that I haven't had a deeper dive into Rubymine. I've
used it mainly for Ruby and Rails development as mentioned in the
podcast. I have noticed the refactorings as there is a fairly obvious
menu to help you learn what is available.

On the CSS side of things, I actually still prefer Coda to RM. Maybe
I'm doing something wrong, but when a CSS file is open in RM, it
doesn't do a whole lot. While Coda, on the other hand, gives me
lightning fast super intelligent type-ahead for all the css I need.
Coda is a native cocoa app, and doesn't "feel" as heavy as RM. That
said, if you know how to get RM to work, I'm all ears!

Making a super intelligent, responsive IDE like RM is not an easy job,
but the Jetbrains guys do a really awesome job. As mentioned, I have
experience with their Resharper product. Knowing how powerful the
refactorings are there, I have to say I was honestly a little
disappointed at the refactoring options in RM. But, I know it's still
in it's early days, and R# was not really great until 2.5 or 3.0, so
as a happy customer myself, I'm waiting patiently until for them to
improve the already excellent IDE they offer...

Thanks,
Saul

[Preston Lee]

I'm trying out RubyMine for the first time today. My first impression
isn't entirely fabulous since it's currently eating over 600MB of RAM
and slowing my poor MacBook to a crawl, but I'm planning to stick with
it for a while and see what happens. I've politely asked the JetBrains
folks to provide a handle of commercial licenses for review purposes.
If they do we'll produce some content later this with a more in-depth
analysis as a team.

Preston

[Saul Mora]

Yeah, bummer on the slowness...

I'm using a late '07 MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a 2 x 2.2 Ghz
Core2Duo and as I mentioned, it can be a little slugish at times. I'm
definitely not experiencing performance issues like Preston, however.
500mb of real memory usage (as reported by Activity Viewer) is fairly
normal for me....

[Preston Lee]

Marcus,

Are you making any performance tweaks to RubyMine? I've used it for an
hour so far and the only thing that's REALLY getting on my nerves at
the moment is the performance. On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM
MacBook, it's painfully slow, even with all my other heavyweight
applications closed.

Preston

On Aug 10, 2009, at 8:19 PM, Marcus Brito wrote:

>