15 ms·

A free, powerful, open sourced editor and IDE constantly improving and growing - what's not to like? - I get that some don't like the electron-based thing/perfo

A free, powerful, open sourced editor and IDE constantly improving and growing - what's not to like? - I get that some don't like the electron-based thing/performance but it never bothered me (and I bought and use both Sublime 2 & 3) - guess it requires a degree of sensitivity that I'm not bothered with - sort of like people who claim they can't hear mp3 because they can only enjoy CD quality audio (not saying it's not true for them, just that luckily I enjoy both the same). The question I'm wondering about is what is Microsoft's end game with this? I'm comparing this to the history of Google Chrome that, when released, was similar in the sense that it was better than the alternatives: wickedly fast, open sourced, with no apparent strings attached. The business benefits to Google and market control from owning Chrome are obvious today and I'm trying to understand the long term view in VSCode - i.e how to you eventually create business value from a free editor? Premium features? Better integration with Microsoft's services? I wonder if there's a deeper vision - I mean, as opposed to Chrome, VSCode does not know much about me personally, does not provide much data to further leverage Microsoft's services, and targets a much narrower audience to begin with. So, what's the business model behind it's development. I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft...

D_Guidi 9y ago
MS biz is azure-based, so I think the worse can happen is to ship vscode with integrated azure tools...
sz4kerto 9y ago
> I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft... Given that the development is very-very cheap for Microsoft, even this single thing could make worthwhile for MS to continue the project. VS code appears on HN regularly, it connects to a demographic that's very different from MS's core dev audience.
Vinnl 9y ago
> some don't like the electron-based thing/performance It's mostly not liking Electron-based, performance is very reasonable for VSCode, I think. As for the end-game: it's most likely luring you into Azure. Tight integration with a proper editor/IDE might give it an edge over competitors.
- balefrost 9y ago
  One very specific performance metric is startup time, and Sublime beats the pants off VSCode in that department. Creating new top-level windows in VSCode is also annoyingly slow compared to Sublime (presumably because it's spinning up a new browser context). Other than that, it seems snappy enough.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    For some reason people still consider startup time a metric worth paying attention to
    - TomasHubelbauer 9y ago
      I use VS Code most of the time, but the reason I always use Notepad for taking quick notes _is_ the startup time of VS Code. If they improved it, I'd be using it for both. It is an important metric for some.
      - wlesieutre 9y ago
        If I need to take a quick look at a file but don't plan on actively doing a bunch of work on it, I usually open in Sublime for the same reason. Still get syntax highlighting and everything, but waiting for VS Code can be long enough to derail my train of thought.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - dmitriid 9y ago
        I work in IntelliJ IDEA whise startup times are horrible. However, since I always work on a set of projects, I never close them, so, essentially, startup time is 0. Also, IDEA has scratch files for quick notes available through a shortcut (I guess VS Code might have a similar plugin), so startup tome isn’t an issue either.
    - 9y ago
albertgoeswoof 9y ago
It's about getting developers back on the MS platform. e.g. if VS Code and the idea of MS supporting OSS was around 5 years ago, perhaps Windows phone might have had enough apps and been successful.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  To extend on that, dotnetcore is dead in the water without a decent and supported cross-platform development experience. Visual Studio and vsmac get the job done for now, but for the long run they need something that also works on linux and is consistent across all three platforms.
  - Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago
    VSCode and the dotnet cli tooling fill this role on Linux. The tools are consistent across all three platforms.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      I've had no end of trouble using .NET on Linux in the past couple of years. Most of my existing projects are broken, too.
      - metamet 9y ago
        Were you using Mono or .NET Core/Standard?
        Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
        Both at different times. My Mono projects started breaking and getting .NET Core/Standard running on anything but their blessed distros is difficult.
        tmzt 9y ago
        There are supported Docker (Linux) containers which can be used as is or extracted and come with needed libraries.
pacala 9y ago
Makes it really easy to use Azure services.
chmln 9y ago
> guess it requires a degree of sensitivity that I'm not bothered with - sort of like people who claim they can't hear mp3 because they can only enjoy CD quality audio (not saying it's not true for them, just that luckily I enjoy both the same). Maybe its better on other platforms, but on linux there's 30ms keyboard input latency in vscode, compared to the avg of 6ms I get in sublime. The perceived difference in responsiveness is significant. See https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ if you're curious.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  I just checked on my win7 box. it's about 80ms. Typing in this reply is about 54ms. Notepad was 67ms. All that is like +/- 8ms. lucky for me it's all unnoticeable.
WorldMaker 9y ago
> what's the business model behind it's development. I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft There are a couple things others touch on, but to expand on a few things: 1. Microsoft was formed for developers in the first place. It's first product was BASIC (for MOS 6502). Developer productivity has always been a part of Microsoft's long term vision of itself. It is entirely possible for VSCode to be developed solely to give developers warm fuzzies and for that to fit Microsoft's long term vision. 2. VSCode gently encourages you to explore other Microsoft tools and services. It's built in Typescript and makes cross-platform .NET a reality and has some useful Azure integration extensions to help you run things on Azure services. Part of the delight to VSCode is that it doesn't hard sell any of those: it offers them as opt-in tools and lets you explore them yourself. (Opinion: This is a wonderful sort of return to confidence from Microsoft that their developer tools nearly sell themselves on their own merits, Microsoft doesn't need to hard sell them.) 3. VSCode is "made out of Azure". Part of why VSCode has seemed so effortless to build was that a lot of the core pieces (particularly the Monaco code editor at the heart of VSCode was built for Azure, then reused by IE/Edge Dev Tools, VSTS, before being brought into its own in VSCode) were built for Azure itself to provide a nice development/devops environment experience in the cloud. That seems a pretty good advertisement for something like Azure when even the systems built to support the services offered are strong development tools of their own merit.
- slededit 9y ago
  Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the MITS Altair 8800 which had an Intel 8080 CPU.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the GE-235. The Altair was the first home computer to have a version of BASIC, but BASIC had already been around for a decade before it was ported over. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
gwking 9y ago
My impression is that VSCode is partly about promoting TypeScript, and for what it's worth it has more or less worked on me. Create a "x.ts" and type some stuff; you will see error messages immediately that are roughly as good a first experience with an IDE as I've ever had. I mostly work in Python and Swift, mostly in VSCode, and I wish the support for those languages was nearly so good. I am an intermediate JS programmer, fiddled with TypeScript a couple of years ago and was unconvinced. Since then TS has matured a lot, and I have been exposed to it in passing from looking at VSCode extensions. If I were to begin a web project today, I would give TypeScript a try. If it weren't for VSCode my thinking would probably be quite different. As an open source project, VSCode is a significant example of TypeScript on Electron. As a self-hosted IDE I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode.
- billti 9y ago
  > I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode You can filter by the "VS Code tracked" label on the TypeScript issues which will give you a rough idea. https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20label%3A%22VS%20Code%20Tracked%22%20 https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...
z3t4 9y ago
Take a look at their telemetry policy, they basically know what type of underpants you are using! Having statistics on what 30% of the worlds' developers are doing and their preferences can be great when making business decisions. It's a bit weird that VScode is intruding on VS market though, it will be interesting when VScode threatens VS - will MS step in and stop them from implementing certain features !?
Franciscouzo 9y ago
Minor nitpick, but Chrome has never been Open Source. Sure, it's mostly Chromium, but the point still stands.
- placebo 9y ago
  True. VSCode is more open source in this sense. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone is happy... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17996 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17996

D_Guidi 9y ago

MS biz is azure-based, so I think the worse can happen is to ship vscode with integrated azure tools...

sz4kerto 9y ago

> I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft... Given that the development is very-very cheap for Microsoft, even this single thing could make worthwhile for MS to continue the project. VS code appears on HN regularly, it connects to a demographic that's very different from MS's core dev audience.

Vinnl 9y ago

> some don't like the electron-based thing/performance It's mostly not liking Electron-based, performance is very reasonable for VSCode, I think. As for the end-game: it's most likely luring you into Azure. Tight integration with a proper editor/IDE might give it an edge over competitors.

balefrost 9y ago
One very specific performance metric is startup time, and Sublime beats the pants off VSCode in that department. Creating new top-level windows in VSCode is also annoyingly slow compared to Sublime (presumably because it's spinning up a new browser context). Other than that, it seems snappy enough.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  For some reason people still consider startup time a metric worth paying attention to
  - TomasHubelbauer 9y ago
    I use VS Code most of the time, but the reason I always use Notepad for taking quick notes _is_ the startup time of VS Code. If they improved it, I'd be using it for both. It is an important metric for some.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      If I need to take a quick look at a file but don't plan on actively doing a bunch of work on it, I usually open in Sublime for the same reason. Still get syntax highlighting and everything, but waiting for VS Code can be long enough to derail my train of thought.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      I work in IntelliJ IDEA whise startup times are horrible. However, since I always work on a set of projects, I never close them, so, essentially, startup time is 0. Also, IDEA has scratch files for quick notes available through a shortcut (I guess VS Code might have a similar plugin), so startup tome isn’t an issue either.
  - 9y ago

albertgoeswoof 9y ago

It's about getting developers back on the MS platform. e.g. if VS Code and the idea of MS supporting OSS was around 5 years ago, perhaps Windows phone might have had enough apps and been successful.

bunderbunder 9y ago
To extend on that, dotnetcore is dead in the water without a decent and supported cross-platform development experience. Visual Studio and vsmac get the job done for now, but for the long run they need something that also works on linux and is consistent across all three platforms.
- Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago
  VSCode and the dotnet cli tooling fill this role on Linux. The tools are consistent across all three platforms.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    I've had no end of trouble using .NET on Linux in the past couple of years. Most of my existing projects are broken, too.
    - metamet 9y ago
      Were you using Mono or .NET Core/Standard?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
        Both at different times. My Mono projects started breaking and getting .NET Core/Standard running on anything but their blessed distros is difficult.
        tmzt 9y ago
        There are supported Docker (Linux) containers which can be used as is or extracted and come with needed libraries.

pacala 9y ago

Makes it really easy to use Azure services.

chmln 9y ago

> guess it requires a degree of sensitivity that I'm not bothered with - sort of like people who claim they can't hear mp3 because they can only enjoy CD quality audio (not saying it's not true for them, just that luckily I enjoy both the same). Maybe its better on other platforms, but on linux there's 30ms keyboard input latency in vscode, compared to the avg of 6ms I get in sublime. The perceived difference in responsiveness is significant. See https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ if you're curious.

DigitalJack 9y ago
I just checked on my win7 box. it's about 80ms. Typing in this reply is about 54ms. Notepad was 67ms. All that is like +/- 8ms. lucky for me it's all unnoticeable.

WorldMaker 9y ago

> what's the business model behind it's development. I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft There are a couple things others touch on, but to expand on a few things: 1. Microsoft was formed for developers in the first place. It's first product was BASIC (for MOS 6502). Developer productivity has always been a part of Microsoft's long term vision of itself. It is entirely possible for VSCode to be developed solely to give developers warm fuzzies and for that to fit Microsoft's long term vision. 2. VSCode gently encourages you to explore other Microsoft tools and services. It's built in Typescript and makes cross-platform .NET a reality and has some useful Azure integration extensions to help you run things on Azure services. Part of the delight to VSCode is that it doesn't hard sell any of those: it offers them as opt-in tools and lets you explore them yourself. (Opinion: This is a wonderful sort of return to confidence from Microsoft that their developer tools nearly sell themselves on their own merits, Microsoft doesn't need to hard sell them.) 3. VSCode is "made out of Azure". Part of why VSCode has seemed so effortless to build was that a lot of the core pieces (particularly the Monaco code editor at the heart of VSCode was built for Azure, then reused by IE/Edge Dev Tools, VSTS, before being brought into its own in VSCode) were built for Azure itself to provide a nice development/devops environment experience in the cloud. That seems a pretty good advertisement for something like Azure when even the systems built to support the services offered are strong development tools of their own merit.

slededit 9y ago
Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the MITS Altair 8800 which had an Intel 8080 CPU.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the GE-235. The Altair was the first home computer to have a version of BASIC, but BASIC had already been around for a decade before it was ported over. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

gwking 9y ago

My impression is that VSCode is partly about promoting TypeScript, and for what it's worth it has more or less worked on me. Create a "x.ts" and type some stuff; you will see error messages immediately that are roughly as good a first experience with an IDE as I've ever had. I mostly work in Python and Swift, mostly in VSCode, and I wish the support for those languages was nearly so good. I am an intermediate JS programmer, fiddled with TypeScript a couple of years ago and was unconvinced. Since then TS has matured a lot, and I have been exposed to it in passing from looking at VSCode extensions. If I were to begin a web project today, I would give TypeScript a try. If it weren't for VSCode my thinking would probably be quite different. As an open source project, VSCode is a significant example of TypeScript on Electron. As a self-hosted IDE I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode.

billti 9y ago
> I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode You can filter by the "VS Code tracked" label on the TypeScript issues which will give you a rough idea. https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20label%3A%22VS%20Code%20Tracked%22%20 https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

z3t4 9y ago

Take a look at their telemetry policy, they basically know what type of underpants you are using! Having statistics on what 30% of the worlds' developers are doing and their preferences can be great when making business decisions. It's a bit weird that VScode is intruding on VS market though, it will be interesting when VScode threatens VS - will MS step in and stop them from implementing certain features !?

Franciscouzo 9y ago

Minor nitpick, but Chrome has never been Open Source. Sure, it's mostly Chromium, but the point still stands.

placebo 9y ago
True. VSCode is more open source in this sense. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone is happy... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17996 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17996