Android Studio, and in turn, Jetbrain's IDE are an absolute godsend for productivity. Quick actions, macros, shortcut egornomics, etc. are top notch and make me a happy developer. I would even dare to say, it's a better IDE than Visual Studio.

runs for cover

Android Studio has such a fat ass. Every release it, and gradle, want more memory to do the same thing. I'm hoping that the tools devs improve or review the resource usage of the gradle plugin, etc. VS Code and the flutter tooling are svelte in comparison.

I hope the memory enhancements show considerable improvements. I've seen people with >32 GB memory complaining that AS eating enough RAM to affect productivity.

Tip: If you have dual GPU system try launching AS, android emulator, Idea, WS, Pycharm, with the discrete GPU i.e (Linux/ATI in my case).

'DRI_PRIME=1 ../studio.sh'

bash -c "LD_PRELOAD='/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6' DRI_PRIME=1 ../android-sdk/emulator/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_27 -gpu host"

I have seen considerable improvements in productivity for the same codebase with 3rd gen corei5 with ATI 7400M series GPU vs 7th gen corei5 with intel integrated gpu both having same memory. The OS setup is same.

Obviously, java by itself isn't using the VRAM; I assume the visual rendering of IDE's & emulators use it and leaves enough RAM for the AS to gulp.

I was going to say that this is not a very big update but it brings https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/#v2017-3

and with it, type hints.

This should be very useful in kotlin with rx. map calls are often hard to follow without explicitly writing types.

This sounds like the best of both worlds.

Has anyone here worked with 3.1 as well as Xcode and can say something about the simulator experience of Android Studio?

I am surprised Google have not acquired JetBrains by now. Android Studio being based on their IntelliJ platform and Kotlin getting first class support in Android is investing a hell of a lot in a relatively small foreign company. Kinda strange as Google have acquired larger companies for less (less reliance not value).