Jetbrains is even lagging behind, look at vscode remote capabilities which is way ahead jetbrains remote features.

Who are intended to use this?

A big part of why I use VSCode over JetBrains stuff is that I only have to deal with one application for all my things.

https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

I use VSCode for most things, haven't tried the Jetbrains stuff much, besides in an interview where it worked "well enough".

Maybe eventually, I'll fork over and try the Jetbrains world. Maybe.

The thing is that without profits to justify continued investment, executives at firms like Microsoft or IBM eventually get bored of old projects and quietly defund them. JetBrains seems to try to limit the number of free-for-browny-points projects it runs. There are some, most notably Kotlin, but by and large cool but expensive-to-develop new features are things you pay for, e.g. Code With Me.

That gives JB sticking power. Also, Java/JVM has been a good platform for them over the years. The tools they're using are fundamentally well designed and it shows. Classical Visual Studio got knocked out of the race a long time ago, partly because it was written in C++ and failed to make the jump beyond 32 bit Windows. It took forever to go to 64 bit and never made it to non-Windows platforms. The JVM largely abstracted JetBrains from both transitions (albeit in recent times they've had to become co-maintainers of Swing), allowing them to focus on just adding features. And Java's general features and robustness compared to HTML5/JS mean they can ship features and improvements at an incredible pace.

They have historically also dogfooded their own philosophy. IDEA was never rewritten from scratch. It's been continuously upgraded and refactored for 20 years now. I actually worry a bit that they're losing this and becoming more "California" with efforts like Fleet and Space because those look suspiciously like large rewrites rather than incremental refactorings. Space might take off but I have grave doubts about Fleet. The way they developed Kotlin with great Java interop and even an auto-converter tool, and then started using it in IntelliJ development, is a much more JetBrainsy thing to do.

Then again, it's all probably relative - most IDEs (including the likes of Visual Studio) are slow compared to something like Lazarus, VS Code can feel slow compared to Sublime or Vim but whether that matters much is up to the reader. Personally, I like the features that JetBrains tools have, and those are more or less my daily drivers (I pay for the Ultimate package of all tools, alongside GitKraken, MobaXTerm and some other software), others might differ in that aspect.

That said, I don't think that JetBrains Fleet is quite as good as VS Code yet, so I use VSC for my more lightweight editing needs or on lower spec devices, sometimes also dropping down to Notepad++/Gedit or Nano for simple text/config files as well.

I tried it with our Rust codebase and it seemed to be fairly competitive with CLion in terms of analysis. I didn't try any refactorings but I did notice that it doesn't have many of them. It was fairly snappy, felt more responsive than CLion. I was disappointed that even after I switched it to "IntelliJ" keybindings many keybindings still were more like VSCode than IntelliJ. I.e. Ctrl-N was still "open new tab" and not "jump to symbol" (have to do ctrl-shift-alt-N for that.)

Overall, I guess I'm curious where they go with it. I won't be trading in my CLion license, though. I am probably not the target audience; I suspect they're looking to capture customers who work in large corporations where VSCode is getting penetration as a hosted/fleet solution. With the default keybindings I suspect those coming from VSCode will find Fleet very comfortable.

For myself, I continue to give Jetbrains money for their IDEs, because as a company they do great work and give good value. I'm happy to modestly help pay the salaries of their employees. I wish them luck.

Also, both have 3rd party plug-ins but JetBrains seems to contain a lot more of the features I want as first class integrations whereas I generally have to find a plugin for VSCode and hope it's well maintained.

Perhaps there are some organizations whom don't want to let their developers use VS Code because of OSS paranoia or legalities, or no option to pay for support, then this could be a nice alternative. Otherwise I don't see this being much of a competitor unless they're willing to open source it and just pay some developers to do the bulk of the core functionality.