OpenIDEA Aims to Rebuild the IntelliJ Experience in Rust
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
A new native app promises the functionality of IntelliJ IDEA with significantly lower memory and CPU overhead.
As first reported on Hacker News, a new project called OpenIDEA is attempting to migrate the established workflow of IntelliJ IDEA—including its tool windows, keymaps, and search habits—into a native application powered by a Rust core. According to documentation hosted on GitHub, the tool supports over 60 languages and includes a debugger, terminal, Git integration, and HTTP and database clients for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Performance benchmarks provided by the project highlight a stark contrast in resource consumption compared to IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2.3. In a test opening a Python project consisting of approximately 770 files on a Windows 11 machine with a 32-core AMD processor and 62 GB of RAM, OpenIDEA demonstrated a median window opening time of 0.9 seconds, compared to 3.1 seconds for IntelliJ IDEA.
Most notably, the GitHub data shows OpenIDEA utilizing 169 MB of memory (USS), while IntelliJ IDEA required 2,011 MB. The CPU time until the application was ready was 2.4 seconds for OpenIDEA and 47.9 seconds for IntelliJ IDEA. The project notes that while IntelliJ IDEA performs deeper Python analysis, meaning the "ready" state is not identical across both tools, the performance gap remains significant.
OpenIDEA is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is not affiliated with JetBrains s.r.o., the owner of the IntelliJ IDEA trademark.