6 ms·

My mind was blown with the "visual IntelliSense" demo. Having a UI component library where you can get a visual preview of what the element looks like while yo

My mind was blown with the "visual IntelliSense" demo. Having a UI component library where you can get a visual preview of what the element looks like while you key up/down through autocomplete options seems drastic for development velocity. What can't you do with VSCode these days? I hope we continue to see a trend of innovative IDE features like this.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> What can't you do with VSCode these days? Run it on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  Microsoft recommends 1+ GB of free RAM, which seems reasonable based on the few times I've checked RAM usage out of curiosity.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Nah, I'm running a cheap N5000 (1.10 GHz) with 4 GB of RAM at home and VScode runs well. At the end of the day, it's the extensions that might slow the editor down as they greatly vary in quality. With only some Typescript/LESS/Node/Linting/Live Reload extensions, VSCode is sitting at 70 Mo right now. I think Microsoft did a great job with it. My machine can barely run Android Studio or Webstorm on the other hand, unless I turn off code inspection.
  - raihansaputra 6y ago
    That's amazing. I've been trying to profile which extensions are causing my slowdowns but still not getting a satisfactory result. I think my ESLint/Vetur is re-checking all open files on every keystroke (not debounced) and it becomes slow after a few hours of the editor being open. But I can't really get it down to a specific extension.
    - jakear 6y ago
      Have you tried profiling the extension host?
      - raihansaputra 6y ago
        Thanks for the tip! Seems like Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 and Rainbow Indentation doesn't play nicely with the Vim extension. Bracket Pair Colorizer 1 is fine though, but I don't have a replacement yet for Rainbow Indentation.
  - hevelvarik 6y ago
    Are you running a browser with multiple tabs, just boggles my mind how that works with 4gb. Are you using a funky light weight window manager. I truly wish to know how you manage it.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  You wouldn't have the development velocity of vs code without Electron. $50 of ram is a small price to pay for better software.
- ldoughty 6y ago
  seems very slim to me, I've used a fork of it on a Raspberry Pi without issues (Side note: recent VSCode release supposedly has ARM support now)
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  Don't complain about things that already have obvious solutions. A lot of programmers think investing in hardware is stupid, because they think "if it was just coded more efficiently, I wouldn't have to". If my car can't pull a trailer that's too heavy, I can complain that the trailer is too heavy and spend way too much time hauling stuff. Or I can buy a car that's better suited for the job and do more work in one day. That's a stupid analogy of course, because a machine with 32Gb of RAM often costs less than what you make in a week. Stop complaining, just deal with it.
Matthias247 6y ago
A lot of these functions where already available a decade ago. The development environment for ActionScript 3 + Flex + Adobe Air was fairly good, and there was also a lot of tooling around live previews and going from a design to code and the other way around available. It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  I was around doing AS3 / Flex / Air in 2006-2007 era and agree, I can’t help but also feel what’s old is new again. If I were to make a guess, IDEs are coming back into favor for a couple reasons (the balance of how much each contributes being debatable): - VSCode, and to a lesser extent the Jetbrains suite of IDEs, are showing that you can have an IDE and it still be reasonably fast. That’s in stark difference to the old Eclipse days as one example. - Developer machines continue to get faster and have more RAM, yet most of the dev tools ecosystem seems to poorly take advantage of that. Compare the memory and processor usage of Slack (which arguable has a simpler task) with VSCode, which both use the same underlying platform (Electron). By so many apps setting such a low bar, it further enhances the view that VSCode is fast. - our codebases continue to grow in size, have yet more dependencies, and yet more moving parts. Things like code completion / doc bubbles / etc are becoming more important as there’s just to much bloat for an average developer to keep in their “active memory” - similar to the above point, our languages keep evolving constantly adding new things, making it harder to stay on top of all the new functionality, but the modern breed of IDEs can help there in a number of ways. - we have a had a big wave of new developers start working over the past 15 years and some of them had NIH for things from the past, and now has reinvented what existed before, in someways better, in some ways worse. I can think of more possible factors, but this is an already long post and I’m sure the ones I posted already will get debated as is.
  - Olreich 6y ago
    I think IDEs and REPLs never went out of style. They just got forgotten about for awhile while the cycle between making updates to code and seeing the results was super fast. There's no need for live components on a simple non-webpacked JS/HTML/CSS webpage. You just reload the page, or have the page reload automatically every second. Now that Node and Webpack take absolutely forever (relatively speaking) to get your JS2020/React/Redux/Bootstrap/SCSS app recompiled after a modification, being able to write the correct thing once and not have to wait a minute to have confidence in it is hugely valuable. Get the REPL time down to a second, and IDEs aren't terribly valuable anymore.
rendall 6y ago
'My mind was blown with the "visual IntelliSense" demo.' I didn't see that. Was that on the VSCode extension page?
- _Microft 6y ago
  I assume they are talking about the preview of UI elements at around 0:36 min into the video. There is a completion dropdown menu where the currently selected element of the list is rendered in a preview window right next to it.
dmitriid 6y ago
Advanced refactoring and code analysis. Visual development like GUI builders (even if these have largely fallen out of favour).

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago

> What can't you do with VSCode these days? Run it on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM.

CharlesW 6y ago
Microsoft recommends 1+ GB of free RAM, which seems reasonable based on the few times I've checked RAM usage out of curiosity.
throw_m239339 6y ago
Nah, I'm running a cheap N5000 (1.10 GHz) with 4 GB of RAM at home and VScode runs well. At the end of the day, it's the extensions that might slow the editor down as they greatly vary in quality. With only some Typescript/LESS/Node/Linting/Live Reload extensions, VSCode is sitting at 70 Mo right now. I think Microsoft did a great job with it. My machine can barely run Android Studio or Webstorm on the other hand, unless I turn off code inspection.
- raihansaputra 6y ago
  That's amazing. I've been trying to profile which extensions are causing my slowdowns but still not getting a satisfactory result. I think my ESLint/Vetur is re-checking all open files on every keystroke (not debounced) and it becomes slow after a few hours of the editor being open. But I can't really get it down to a specific extension.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Have you tried profiling the extension host?
    - raihansaputra 6y ago
      Thanks for the tip! Seems like Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 and Rainbow Indentation doesn't play nicely with the Vim extension. Bracket Pair Colorizer 1 is fine though, but I don't have a replacement yet for Rainbow Indentation.
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  Are you running a browser with multiple tabs, just boggles my mind how that works with 4gb. Are you using a funky light weight window manager. I truly wish to know how you manage it.
jjeaff 6y ago
You wouldn't have the development velocity of vs code without Electron. $50 of ram is a small price to pay for better software.
ldoughty 6y ago
seems very slim to me, I've used a fork of it on a Raspberry Pi without issues (Side note: recent VSCode release supposedly has ARM support now)
spiderfarmer 6y ago
Don't complain about things that already have obvious solutions. A lot of programmers think investing in hardware is stupid, because they think "if it was just coded more efficiently, I wouldn't have to". If my car can't pull a trailer that's too heavy, I can complain that the trailer is too heavy and spend way too much time hauling stuff. Or I can buy a car that's better suited for the job and do more work in one day. That's a stupid analogy of course, because a machine with 32Gb of RAM often costs less than what you make in a week. Stop complaining, just deal with it.

Matthias247 6y ago

A lot of these functions where already available a decade ago. The development environment for ActionScript 3 + Flex + Adobe Air was fairly good, and there was also a lot of tooling around live previews and going from a design to code and the other way around available. It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.

jsjohnst 6y ago
I was around doing AS3 / Flex / Air in 2006-2007 era and agree, I can’t help but also feel what’s old is new again. If I were to make a guess, IDEs are coming back into favor for a couple reasons (the balance of how much each contributes being debatable): - VSCode, and to a lesser extent the Jetbrains suite of IDEs, are showing that you can have an IDE and it still be reasonably fast. That’s in stark difference to the old Eclipse days as one example. - Developer machines continue to get faster and have more RAM, yet most of the dev tools ecosystem seems to poorly take advantage of that. Compare the memory and processor usage of Slack (which arguable has a simpler task) with VSCode, which both use the same underlying platform (Electron). By so many apps setting such a low bar, it further enhances the view that VSCode is fast. - our codebases continue to grow in size, have yet more dependencies, and yet more moving parts. Things like code completion / doc bubbles / etc are becoming more important as there’s just to much bloat for an average developer to keep in their “active memory” - similar to the above point, our languages keep evolving constantly adding new things, making it harder to stay on top of all the new functionality, but the modern breed of IDEs can help there in a number of ways. - we have a had a big wave of new developers start working over the past 15 years and some of them had NIH for things from the past, and now has reinvented what existed before, in someways better, in some ways worse. I can think of more possible factors, but this is an already long post and I’m sure the ones I posted already will get debated as is.
- Olreich 6y ago
  I think IDEs and REPLs never went out of style. They just got forgotten about for awhile while the cycle between making updates to code and seeing the results was super fast. There's no need for live components on a simple non-webpacked JS/HTML/CSS webpage. You just reload the page, or have the page reload automatically every second. Now that Node and Webpack take absolutely forever (relatively speaking) to get your JS2020/React/Redux/Bootstrap/SCSS app recompiled after a modification, being able to write the correct thing once and not have to wait a minute to have confidence in it is hugely valuable. Get the REPL time down to a second, and IDEs aren't terribly valuable anymore.

rendall 6y ago

'My mind was blown with the "visual IntelliSense" demo.' I didn't see that. Was that on the VSCode extension page?

_Microft 6y ago
I assume they are talking about the preview of UI elements at around 0:36 min into the video. There is a completion dropdown menu where the currently selected element of the list is rendered in a preview window right next to it.

dmitriid 6y ago

Advanced refactoring and code analysis. Visual development like GUI builders (even if these have largely fallen out of favour).