Month: October 2009

First look at open source IntelliJ

IntelliJ IDEA was open sourced yesterday!

Codebase overview

  • over 20k java source files, totalling just over 2M lines
  • over 150 jar files
  • over 500 xml files
  • build system based on ant, gant, and a library called jps for running intellij builds for which the source apparently is not available yet (see IDEA-25160)
  • Apache license header applied to most of the files, copyrights both jetbrains and a variety of individuals, license data not quite complete, no NOTICE.txt (see IDEA-25161)
  • ./platform is the core system
  • ./plugins plug into the core platform
  • ./java and ./xml are bigger plugin-collection-ish subsystems

Building…

  • Install ant (there is an ant in ./lib/ant)
  • Run ant
  • Build takes about 7 minutes on my macbook

Running…

On Mac OS X I run into 64 bit problems. Falling back to a 32-bit version of JDK 5.0 works for me…seems like jetbrains may have just fixed it.

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin
sudo bash
mv java java.orig
lipo java -remove x86_64 -output java_x32
ln -s java_32 java
cd -
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
rm -Rf out
ant
cd out/artifacts
unzip ideaIC-90.SNAPSHOT.mac.zip
open ./Maia-IC-90.SNAPSHOT.app

Loading the idea source code into your just-built ide works seemlessly (just navigate to your git repo, an intellij project is already set up in the .idea directory.

Reading the code

com.intellij.idea.Main uses Boostrap and MainImpl to invoke IdeaApplication.run(). We’re in IntelliJ OpenAPI land now. Somewhere further down the call stack something creates an ApplicationImpl which uses PicoContainer. w00t! That makes much more sense to me than the heavyweight OSGi/equinox that’s underpinning eclipse. Its where plugins and extensions get loaded, after which things become very fluid and multi-threaded and harder to follow.

So now I’m thinking I should find a way to hook up IntelliJ into a debugger inside another IntelliJ…though it’d be cool if intellij was somehow “self-hosting” in that sense. Here’s hoping the intellij devs will write some how-to-hack docs soon!