Code Quality · JetBrains plugin

Background ReadAction Freeze Companion

Free

Concurrency / Async Bugs

Flags a background-thread entry point in your plugin's own code that can reach a blocking, non-cancellable read-lock call: the pattern JetBrains' own Platform team has publicly named as a real, recurring cause of IDE freezes, with no static tooling to catch it today.

70Downloads
0GitHub stars
—Published
FreePricing

The gap it fixes

Not the usual "a paid competitor's users are complaining" story this catalog is built around -- this one is motivated directly by JetBrains' own Platform Blog:

  • ["Investigating IntelliJ Platform UI Freezes"](https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2025/09/investigating-intellij-platform-ui-freezes/) (Sept 2025): detecting a freeze today is manual, post-mortem thread-dump analysis, after it already happened in a real user's IDE.
  • ["UI Freezes and the Dangers of Non-Cancellable Read Actions in Background Threads"](https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/03/ui-freezes-and-the-dangers-of-non-cancellable-read-actions-in-background-threads/) (March 2026): "many reports actually show problems in plugins that contain that single erroneous pattern" -- a background thread calling ReadAction.compute()/ReadAction.run()/Application#runReadAction(), none of them cancellable, blocking the write lock and freezing the UI. The post gives a real code example and names a real plugin ("Package Checker") affected by it. It states plainly that there's no static tool for this today.

Verified independently (not just taken on the blog's word): neither the official Plugin Verifier (bytecode compatibility, not locking semantics) nor any of the 8 new Kotlin coroutine inspections shipped in IDEA 2025.2-2026.1 cover this pattern.

Facts and pricing

Category
Code Quality
Pricing
Free
Platform
IntelliJ-family
First published
—
Marketplace ID
#34085
Repository
background-readaction-freeze-companion
Growth
▲ +1650.0% since 2026-09-05 (4→70)
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