Dmitry Jemerov on IntelliJ internals #coffeesoftware

Dmitry Jemerov, a key IntelliJ contributor, reflects on a major architectural lowlight in IntelliJ IDEA: the read/write action locking model. The design tied write locks to the event dispatch thread (EDT), which is exactly the wrong thread for heavyweight work. He contrasts this with an earlier, better approach used in a predecessor IDE that used a dedicated 'resource thread' separate from the EDT for internal database operations, avoiding the UI-blocking issues that plagued IntelliJ for years.