{"slug": "clion", "name": "CLion", "category": "editors", "category_name": "Editors and IDEs", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 11, "warners": 2, "score": 3.536, "rising": -1.64, "first": "2025-11-01", "latest": "2026-08-27", "why": "I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 4, "compare": 1, "warn": 2}, "spark": [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "jetbrains.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["CLion"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 784740881, "item_id": 49046305, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49046305", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the best experience appears to be with Clion", "excerpt": "I give you that Intelisense is broken as always, and the best experience appears to be with Clion, but I can live with it. Best experience is VC++ with MSBuild, cmake/ninja work great with latest clang however import std support is not yet enabled by default in CMake. I only care about VC++ for hobby coding, hence using modules. See for example, https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-CPP", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The PImpl idiom and the C++26 std:indirect type"}, {"id": 770978544, "item_id": 48186159, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186159", "by": "pyjarrett", "date": "2026-05-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air", "excerpt": "> I tend to run older hardware, > the tool is so fricken slow. How old is \"old hardware\"? I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air and a i5-10400 (Linux). These projects are only in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code though. > The install is gigantic on disk, leading me to avoid it on my older machines where space is limited. I found that by default toolbox likes to keep old versions of the I", "context": "", "use_case": "C/C++ development", "switched_from": "", "story": "No More JetBrains Products for Me"}, {"id": 765722064, "item_id": 47857629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47857629", "by": "FpUser", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code", "excerpt": "I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code. I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on \"normal\" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that", "context": "", "use_case": "C++ development", "switched_from": "", "story": "SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year"}, {"id": 765707184, "item_id": 47856699, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47856699", "by": "FpUser", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.", "excerpt": "I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year"}, {"id": 742451489, "item_id": 46403218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403218", "by": "hoistbypetard", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I guess I'll use Clion for my platformio stuff:", "excerpt": "I appreciate the clarity, anyway. I will wait and see how intrusive the AI focus turns out to be. If it turns out to be very intrusive, I guess I'll use Clion for my platformio stuff: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/platformio.html (since I've already got a Toolbox subscription from them) and neovim or zed for my blog. That's really all I was using VS Code for anyway.", "context": "", "use_case": "PlatformIO embedded dev", "switched_from": "", "story": "VSCode rebrands as \"The open source AI code editor\""}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 791380384, "item_id": 49461274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461274", "by": "renox", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "until increasing the garbage collector maximum heap size all I had was a blank screen", "excerpt": "You're phrasing this as if using an IDE was always an advantage, but unfortunately this isn't always the case: -IDEs are more resources hungry, I remember when trying to use CLion on a big C++ codebase, until increasing the garbage collector maximum heap size all I had was a blank screen, after it was just unusably slow... -even when IDE work, LSP for C++ codebase aren't very good, for example the caller hierarchy is", "context": "C++ developer", "use_case": "big C++ codebase", "switched_from": "", "story": "A curmudgeon tries a language server"}, {"id": 735397904, "item_id": 45962369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45962369", "by": "josephg", "date": "2025-11-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Makefiles aren't supported well by clion or visual studio.", "excerpt": "> You make some good, if oft-repeated, points They're oft repeated because they're real problems. > a plain Makefile works. > C has LSP support, like every other language. I haven't noticed C support in editors to be worse than other languages. Makefiles aren't supported well by clion or visual studio. LSP requires a compile-commands list to be able to work - which is a pita to export from makefiles. XCode and visual", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"}]}], "who": [{"by": "cletus", "context": "Xoogler (2010-2017)", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125501", "date": "2026-05-13"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["c++ development", "big c++ codebase", "c/c++ development", "debugging constexpr", "platformio embedded dev", "c++ ide and debugging"], "compared": [{"slug": "visual-studio-code", "name": "Visual Studio Code", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "cmake", "name": "CMake", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293", "title": "SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448150", "title": "A curmudgeon tries a language server", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032095", "title": "The PImpl idiom and the C++26 std:indirect type", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48185188", "title": "No More JetBrains Products for Me", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073979", "title": "A History of IDEs at Google", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47705413", "title": "I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 791380384, "item_id": 49461274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461274", "by": "renox", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "until increasing the garbage collector maximum heap size all I had was a blank screen", "excerpt": "You're phrasing this as if using an IDE was always an advantage, but unfortunately this isn't always the case: -IDEs are more resources hungry, I remember when trying to use CLion on a big C++ codebase, until increasing the garbage collector maximum heap size all I had was a blank screen, after it was just unusably slow... -even when IDE work, LSP for C++ codebase aren't very good, for example the caller hierarchy is", "context": "C++ developer", "use_case": "big C++ codebase", "switched_from": "", "story": "A curmudgeon tries a language server"}, {"id": 784740881, "item_id": 49046305, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49046305", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the best experience appears to be with Clion", "excerpt": "I give you that Intelisense is broken as always, and the best experience appears to be with Clion, but I can live with it. Best experience is VC++ with MSBuild, cmake/ninja work great with latest clang however import std support is not yet enabled by default in CMake. I only care about VC++ for hobby coding, hence using modules. See for example, https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-CPP", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The PImpl idiom and the C++26 std:indirect type"}, {"id": 770978544, "item_id": 48186159, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186159", "by": "pyjarrett", "date": "2026-05-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air", "excerpt": "> I tend to run older hardware, > the tool is so fricken slow. How old is \"old hardware\"? I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air and a i5-10400 (Linux). These projects are only in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code though. > The install is gigantic on disk, leading me to avoid it on my older machines where space is limited. I found that by default toolbox likes to keep old versions of the I", "context": "", "use_case": "C/C++ development", "switched_from": "", "story": "No More JetBrains Products for Me"}, {"id": 770008018, "item_id": 48125501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125501", "by": "cletus", "date": "2026-05-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Other people actually made CLion work reasonably well with C++ too.", "excerpt": "There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more complicated. Some still used vim/emacs but a lot of people used Eclipse. Now Eclipse was a real problem at Google because of the source control system. Java IDEs are primarily built to import", "context": "Xoogler (2010-2017)", "use_case": "C++ development", "switched_from": "", "story": "A History of IDEs at Google"}, {"id": 765722064, "item_id": 47857629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47857629", "by": "FpUser", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code", "excerpt": "I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code. I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on \"normal\" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that", "context": "", "use_case": "C++ development", "switched_from": "", "story": "SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year"}, {"id": 765707184, "item_id": 47856699, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47856699", "by": "FpUser", "date": "2026-04-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.", "excerpt": "I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year"}, {"id": 763350673, "item_id": 47709417, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709417", "by": "beckford", "date": "2026-04-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "is has had CMake debugging since cmake 3.27", "excerpt": "That hasn't been true for a few years at least. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/cmake-debug.html is has had CMake debugging since cmake 3.27. Ditto for vscode and probably other C IDEs I am not familiar with. So does Gradle for Java. GNU make is hardly exclusive.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"}, {"id": 760048481, "item_id": 47503030, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503030", "by": "germandiago", "date": "2026-03-24", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I use CLion mostly but I never stop coming back to Emacs+LSP.", "excerpt": "Is Eclipse CDT still good these days? Wow did not hear of it for a while. I thought C++ support was not maintained anymore. I use CLion mostly but I never stop coming back to Emacs+LSP. And yes, the analysis is quite competitive tbh. People often talk about this weird thing or the other in C++ but the experience is quite better than what the ISO standard strictly has to offer.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Incoherent Rust"}, {"id": 748038064, "item_id": 46752379, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752379", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-01-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "you can debug it on IDEs, Clion already has some work into that direction.", "excerpt": "While I agree it has a certain Perl feeling and I used to advocate for functions/operators, e.g. reflex or similar, it still feels better than unicode operators in FP languages or the two macro systems used by Rust. At least being based on compile time execution infrastructure means you can debug it on IDEs, Clion already has some work into that direction. https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/09/introducing-constexp", "context": "", "use_case": "debugging constexpr", "switched_from": "", "story": "C++26 Reflection loves QRangeModel"}, {"id": 744658480, "item_id": 46541155, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541155", "by": "gallexme", "date": "2026-01-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When using my usual IDE(clion)", "excerpt": "When using my usual IDE(clion) i just use their integration https://codeassist.google/ It works fine / about as good as aistudio", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI"}, {"id": 742451489, "item_id": 46403218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403218", "by": "hoistbypetard", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I guess I'll use Clion for my platformio stuff:", "excerpt": "I appreciate the clarity, anyway. I will wait and see how intrusive the AI focus turns out to be. If it turns out to be very intrusive, I guess I'll use Clion for my platformio stuff: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/platformio.html (since I've already got a Toolbox subscription from them) and neovim or zed for my blog. That's really all I was using VS Code for anyway.", "context": "", "use_case": "PlatformIO embedded dev", "switched_from": "", "story": "VSCode rebrands as \"The open source AI code editor\""}, {"id": 735397904, "item_id": 45962369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45962369", "by": "josephg", "date": "2025-11-17", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Makefiles aren't supported well by clion or visual studio.", "excerpt": "> You make some good, if oft-repeated, points They're oft repeated because they're real problems. > a plain Makefile works. > C has LSP support, like every other language. I haven't noticed C support in editors to be worse than other languages. Makefiles aren't supported well by clion or visual studio. LSP requires a compile-commands list to be able to work - which is a pita to export from makefiles. XCode and visual", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"}, {"id": 732574097, "item_id": 45785881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785881", "by": "suby", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "CLion is smart about surfacing relevant suggestions first", "excerpt": "I don't think Helix can currently match the C++ experience you get with VS Code. * Debugging is rough. There's experimental DAP support, but it isn't ready to be used. I was able to set breakpoints and step through the code, but the UI for exploring variables / state while paused felt missing or was unintuitive enough that I couldn't figure it out. I use CLion for debugging. * Goto definition works with clangd as lon", "context": "", "use_case": "C++ IDE and debugging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Beginner-friendly, unofficial documentation for Helix text editor"}]}