PyCharm’s Transition to Apple Silicon
Nafiul Islam (via Hacker News):
With the deprecation of Java on the Mac, certain things such as font-rendering on retina screens became more difficult using the version of Java that Oracle released. In order to remedy this, JetBrains forked the OpenJDK project in order to facilitate better control over how the IDEs looked on Macs a well as other HiDPI screens; JetBrains Runtime was born and we bundled it with our IDEs from 2014.
[…]
The change to Apple Silicon meant that we’d need to re-write a lot of JetBrains Runtime, to make sure that we had adequate performance.
[…]
It soon turned out that we had to re-write a lot of the JIT system, a core component of the JVM itself, which was something we had little to no experience in.
Eventually, we did manage to solve this issue with the help of Azul Systems. To hear the whole story, listen to the podcast, where I talk to Konstantin Bulenkov, who had to weather the storm of this fundamental change.
The podcast episode is here.
