Also, like where else would the indices live? They are in memory to make going to definition, source, analysis etc fast. It's not even using java objects for these, so a feature-equivalent solution would be similarly "fat".

This is actually not an exaggeration. Ive been using WebStorm when it worked well, then it became progressively slower to the point of being unusable even on small projects.

Nah, there is little demand for it that's the reason.

LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often. Most Java devs use IntelliJ or another IDE with its inbuilt thing. For everyone else the existing one is good enough for incidental usage.

So ~no one cares

I am actively working on a fast language server for Java and kotlin.

I’m driving it daily and it’s much faster than IJ for what I need, although it doesn’t provide all the diagnostics that IJ does…

It’s on github.com/pepegar/ktlsp if you’re curious.

Exactly. I've been trying to say this. Some people think that because people can write CRUD APIs and end-user apps with AI, no-one will need to write code anymore.

There is so much to be built in terms of tooling and libraries where we need tight, solid, well-crafted, original, unique code.

How is the Oracle one? It has better reviews in VS Code marketplace than the Red Hat one (jdtls)

why do you need a java language server? Let them use the same tooling you would use in CI

The one in VS Code seems fine. It's not quite intellij level, but what is.

And speaking on llm and lsp. The new PHP lsp PHPantom (with help of llms) is approaching jetbrains offering fast.

Exactly, I've been using their community edition for years for Kotlin development. Works fine for normal day to day development needs. I had a paid subscription for a while that I just let expire because I rely more on agentic coding tools these days and I just don't write a lot of code by hand at this point. The paid version adds a lot of deeper integrations and tools that you may or may not need. Personally, I don't really miss most of that. These days the community edition and the paid edition are the same. But if you don't take a subscription, the paid stuff is unavailable.

As a company, Jetbrains is a private company. It's one of the few large software companies that managed to get there without selling out to VCs or the vultures on the stock market. Of course they want to make a profit but they also create a lot of value for developers. Including a lot of open source things. I think it's nice that it's still possible to create a business by bootstrapping and without compromising your values.

I think Jetbrains did that already; the Kotlin LSP server is derived from the (also open source) IntelliJ plugin