The VS Code Go extension joins the Go project | Hacker News Reader

The VS Code Go extension joins the Go project

blog.golang.org

81 pointsSamWhited15 comments

The Go extension hasn't been working for me in months. I have tried recompiling the required toolset, wiping and reinstalling VSCode and nuking GOPATH, to no avail.

I then evaluated Jetbrain's GoLand (which is a paid product) and that thing can't even extract methods or refactor names properly.

The situation is so miserable I went back to ACME with https://godoc.org/github.com/davidrjenni/A which for some reason works.

GoLand extract methods very well, and I don't remember refactoring names ever being a problem. It works far far better than vscode go ever worked.

Is there any blog/video discussing architecture of VSCode. From my limited understanding it seems to have made some brilliant choices, but don't have enough time(skills?) to go through the code. Someone discussing arch, various choices and implication would be really neat.

In terms of language support there are 3 big things

1) Syntax highlighting. They followed the textmate bundle highlighting spec which is somewhat a standard that is shared by many editors.

2) Language Server Protocol - a JSON RPC based protocol that different languages can hook into. The interface is something like. “The users cursor is at this position, what code completion items need to be shown? Where are the errors and warnings?”

3) Debug Protocol - similar JSON RPC protocol, but for debugging. For this breakpoint, show the scopes, the stack trace, console logs etc

Almost everything in Vscode communicates in an async manner. The main UI is on an isolated process, and all extensions are on a different process so they don’t stall the UI.

It’s a modularized and RPC based architecture.

Vscode used to be so good a while back for Go development. Migration to gopls had some hiccups I guess. Hope this will fix that(if not already)

VS Code and gopls has been a pleasant experience for me the past few months.

Same, except that you still can't execute expressions in the debugger. It only reads existing values. I think it's something with Delve.

gopls has gotten a lot better in the past few months. I use the vim “version” of VSCode extensions (coc) and all the LSP stuff has gotten faster and more accurate

I'd say this is very much on gopls. VS already had lots of time to perfect their LSP client implementation, it should be just plug and play

> The VS Code extension for Go, built using many of these tools, is now used by 41 percent of Go developers

That's impressive, I didn't realize VS Code is that popular nowadays.

Yeah I think it managed to take over a lot of users from Sublime Text and Atom, and it's probably the best option out there for people that don't want / can't have a full IDE like VS or IDEA.

The latter is a licensed product, I had to pull some strings to get a license at my current job. Well worth it though, I worked in VS Code earlier but it wasn't as complete as IDEA. For example, in my particular case I work in an older codebase targeting ES5 (no transpilers or whatever) and PHP 5.3; setting the language mode to those, I get warnings if I try to use PHP's short array syntax or ES6+ specific functions. At the same time I'm working on a replacement in Typescript/React and Go. It just works without a hassle, and I get things like go to definition and common refactorings working out of the box.

I still do my builds and running on the commandline though, it has to be portable.

My company offered to pay for IDEA, so I tried out the free version, and it was just miserably laggy. Not unusable, but it felt like every little interaction had a 100ms delay. On a brand new MacBook Pro. I decided I couldn't deal with that all day every day so I quickly went back to VSCode.

Catalina has caused a bad IDEA experience for me; updating tanked performance.

I really enjoy vscode. It has a pretty shallow learning curve for the amount of tooling it provides.

I'm happy for this extension, which I like.

Months ago I tried configuring and running the extensions for Go on Emacs on Windows and it was a nightmare and a loss of time.

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