Microsoft killed Atom the day they took over Github - they haven't had the balls to say anything publicly, but just go look at the commit graphs in the Atom repos. Here's a summary: https://twitter.com/DuncanLock/status/1177747512905461760

And here are the contributor graphs: https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors

If Microsoft can sustain so many teams working on To-Do apps https://twitter.com/4Lou/status/1265723231396417536?s=20 that they need a chart to illustrate how your To-Dos will move between apps, I think Microsoft can afford to put a small team towards maintaining Atom while a larger team works on VS Code and separately Visual Studio. There are different target audiences, and unless Atom and VS Code end up borrowing architecture ideas from each other, and introduce API compatibility, I don’t see that changing in the near future. Generally speaking, Microsoft cares enough about existing customers and backwards-compatibility that I could see them maintaining it until there’s more overlap in UI. There’s another option too, that GitHub is large enough they might prefer using Atom internally over VS Code by enough developers to support the project in the spare time of the developers using Atom instead. So I’d say Atom is only discontinued if it breaks due to lack of developer use and interest, like just about any open source project. I mean, has Bower been discontinued? https://bower.io/ No, but yes? ;-)

Atom is already effectively discontinued, no more eng happening from what I heard.

Is there any crossover in contributors from atom to VSCode since the acquisition? If I were working on Atom when GitHub got acquired, I’d be eager to switch to contributing to VSCode just from a career perspective. It seems like there is more potential for cross organization collaboration and growth there.