RUN command

I was asked to answer this question, but I haven't been in the Java community or written a single line of Java code for about 4~5 yrs, so my answer will be based upon my knowledge of Java & its tool from years ago.

Objectively speaking, Java isn't a very fast language, most of the popular Java IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse, Netbeans ...) were written entirely in Java. So no matter how well written and optimized their coebases might be, they are never going to have the same level of performance as Visual Studio or Xcode, which were written using C-family languages.

IntelliJ is one of those memory hog programs, it runs faster and better on good CPU w/ lots of RAM. Did you allocate enough heap memory for Intellij's vm in the setting? This is very important, because unless these values are set correctly, IntelliJ's performance will be severely handicapped for not being able to make good use of the onboard memory in your computer. Here's one StackOverflow post on this topic http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28760415/how-should-i-set-the-memory-for-intellij-14. There're many articles written on how to set the right values of Xms, Xmx, XX:MaxPermSize for JVM, you just need to do some googling & researching, and try out different numbers for these values to figure out what's the optimal # on your own MBP

Hope it helps.

Thanks William for the detailed and technical answer. I will read the link and see how I can go forward.