C/C++ Extension for Visual Studio Code | Hacker News Reader

C/C++ Extension for Visual Studio Code

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

56 pointsoblio20 comments

I don't understand what the end goal of Visual Studio Code is. It is gradually growing into a full-blown IDE, with IntelliSense, linting, refactoring, debugging, its own extensions, etc. Is Microsoft just trying to rewrite VS using JavaScript to have a cross-platform IDE instead of porting VS?

My guess is this is going to become a full blown toolkit that easily enables Azure development. Once you can one-click deploy a service to Azure and then write the library that exports to Xcode or Android studio, Microsoft wins.

It's possible what we're seeing right now is a lot of A/B testing to gauge what people on OS X and Linux really want out of a text editor.

> instead of porting VS

i imagine that the vs gui is rather platform specific and would require a complete rewrite. so "porting" would, i guess, resemble something like what we're seeing with VSCode. would rather the gui was in QT, but such is life.

(not to suggest VSCode is actually a proper porting attempt, i have no idea.)

Visual Studio Code started as a fork of their online Visual Studio editor -- so they already had that code to make into a cross-platform IDE. If their goal was to make a cross-platform IDE from scratch, they probably wouldn't have started this way.

I really want to know too.

Is this just Visual Studio for JSers?

The Go plugin has quickly made it into one of the major tools of choice for that community, or so I've heard.

This is amazing for my use case - I need use C++ and Emscripten to maintain a portable logic set, use TypeScript/HTML for web frontend and python for tooling - VSCode is excellent TS IDE, I don't really need an IDE for Python so the editor only is fine(they break when working with native binaries anyway), and working with C++/emscripten within the same editor will be huge.

The only thing I'm missing is file icons in file view - can't believe how big this is for navigating huge projects - it's the only reason I keep atom installed on my machine - light editing and mostly browsing/moving files/renaming/etc.

I think this integration looks very promising.

At least on Linux, I've tried many IDE solutions... Eclipse, Netbeans, CLion, Code Blocks, Anjuta, KDevelop... from all of them I've found more the most success with CLion. But my use case doesn't really go beyond what this list of features are.

... except for the build system. No mention of CMake in the article. I think CMake support is a key feature.

Have you tried Qt Creator? I think that is pretty decent.

Qt Creator feels more lightweight and very responsive than CLion. But also feels a little bit too close with Qt.

Initially I didn't like Qt at first because the licensing legalese seemed too complicated for me to understand.

I also felt that KDE and Qt was some sort of technical shotgun wedding that could blow up at any moment.

My main gripe with Qt creator is that I find it very ugly. But thats an opinion obviously

I think I saw an issue or something, can't find the link anymore. If I recall correctly they were saying that build tool support is on the roadmap.

It was really interesting to read that debugging was working in Linux, while MacOSX support was being worked on. Support for Windows was completely missing.

That's because while VSCode works on Windows, it's primarily aimed at people who are on OSX or Linux. Windows users have access to Visual Studio.

Also because they are just using VSCode as a front end for GDB. GDB does not ship on OSX and you have to compile from scratch to install it. GDB also doesn't work with MSVC binaries so that explains the lack of Windows support.

gdb is available on mac without compiling using macports or downloading using brew. You do have to sign it yourself though as osx blocks debuggers from debugging without a signature. For windows debugging, we suggest using the community edition of Visual Studio (https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-co...)

Given the GDB integration I'd love to see a proper Rust debugger. VS Code seems like a solid base for a nice Rust IDE.

For Windows they could have used their own debugger, CDB.

any chance we see this for Red Hat, Sun, or AIX?

RHEL 7.2 x64 should work today but requires manual installation steps as described in the extension. We'd love hear feedback on the direction this work should go. There is an insiders group for that purpose available here http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/c-nonwin

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