Visual Studio for Mac Moving to Native UI | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio for Mac Moving to Native UI

devblogs.microsoft.com

45 pointstrauco26 comments

I wonder at which point does it make sense to switch from VSCode, regardless of its absolute exemplary use of Electron, to VS2022 for that sweet performance gain on non-M1 Macs.

Have you tried Panic Nova? Should be similar, I guess.

Best native editor of the current decade, but after years of working with Atom and then VSCode, leaving the JS-everything plugin ecosystem is tough. I constantly want to make the switch myself too.

>at which point does it make sense to switch from VSCode, regardless of its absolute exemplary use of Electron, to VS2022

It seems like those 2 IDEs have different ecosystems:

- VSCode - has more non-NET non-C# coding such as Javascript/Python/Rust -- which means more 3rd-party plugins contributed by the community

- Visual Studio - more emphasis on .NET and C# with all extra bells & whistles such as WPF GUI builder etc.

Yes, one can try to do the opposite of their ecosystem strengths (VSCode for C# and VS2022 for Node.js Javascript) but that's going against the current. In other words, it's not really a Electron-vs-native type of decision. It's about core language ecosystem.

(Microsoft's confusing branding strategy of naming one as "Visual Studio" and the other with 99% identical name of "Visual Studio _Code_" does not make it obvious how those IDEs are positioned for different markets.)

VS 2022 is still a lot slower for me and also doesn't support Java, Rust, Scala, Go, etc development

I love it for C# and C++ but they're not apples to apples at all IMO

VS for PC at least supports both JavaScript and Python.

> that's going against the current

What does that that mean in practice?

>> that's going against the current

>What does that that mean in practice?

In practice, it means Javascript/Python programmers have more community knowledge/plugins in VSCode than VS2019.

Yes, even though VS2010 added Python language support 5 years before VSCode was released in 2015, they have very different ecosystems and communities.

VSCode is more popular with the Python community (especially in the open source landscape) than VS2019. E.g. virtually all Python/Jupyter data science tutorials use VSCode instead of VS2019.

Even though one code Python in VS2019, a lot of programmers realize they don't code "Python in a vacuum" and want the tech advancements made by the community (plugins, tutorials, etc). VSCode costing $0 also helps too.

That's the point I was trying to make with my parent comment: it's not really comparing Electron runtime vs native code; it's comparing core language ecosystems.

VS2019 is more prominent for companies compiling C++ native apps and C# corporate apps (ASP.NET and WPF projects). That VS2019 also has Javascript and Python support doesn't change the fact that the majority mindshare for js/py is over in VSCode.

Also, the latest dev surveys I saw reported that for Python coders, VSCode recently surpassed Jetbrains Pycharm in popularity.

I've just seen that MonoDevelop, the open-source project behind Xamarin Studio/Visual Studio for Mac, has been "archived" in 2020. That's a shame.

We've come a long way from Mono being about modern app development for GNOME and Linux.

Notice that this is talking about Visual Studio, not VSCode.

I got confused for a second

And even more confusing, it's "Visual Studio for Mac" which is a completely different product than "Visual Studio" ("VS Mac" is just a rebranded MonoDevelop).

Visual Studio Mac is now quite a lot different from MonoDevelop. I've used both (though the latter was a long time ago outside of Unity) and VS Mac is quite a lot more "there" and is definitely a more full implementation. It was closer to VS in 2019, I've yet to install 2022 so I can't speak for it.

VS Code on Mac was quite buggy till recently. If you opened a large file or a file with long lines, the editor would crawl to a halt. I have a project where I use VSMac to do all the C# and VSCode to do the C (as VSMac 2019 doesn't actually support C or C++ projects - not even CMake IIRC) and there was one file with very long lines that VS Code couldn't handle. I did notice that a recent update seems to have fixed VS Code though (it might have been the C++ plugin that was broken to be honest, I don't know.)

We have come full circle. :) I don't mind though, I hope this makes working with large CSV/JSON files less painful.

Note, Visual Studio for Mac is not really Visual Studio, it's a rebranded version of MonoDevelop

That's a bit misleading. It's a rebranded Xamarin Studio, which was based on MonoDevelop. But the a lot of the underlying engine and code renderers are based on Visual Studio now (as of 2019). The longer it is since it was called "MonoDevelop" the less "MonoDevelop" code is left. If 2022 has removed the GTK+ UI wrapper, I guess it is very distantly based on MonoDevelop now.

What was the ui built with before? .NET?

Visuals with GTK+ https://mobile.twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/144804038164...

That same thread says they're rebuilding it with Xamarin.mac. Is that native? I would have thought native would be Swift.

Xamarin.Mac bridges .NET and Objective C.

Bye Gtk.

GNOME Project people are absolutely destroying the GTK ecosystem.

What have they been doing to damage gtk?

Scaring away, and alienating the last decent maintainers.

GTK now effectively stands for Gnome ToolKit.

I love VSCode, but you can totally feel that it's a browser.

I salute Microsoft for this move. Hopefully many others will follow.

It's about Visual Studio NOT Visual Studio Code

Yes, this is about Visual Studio, but why the downvote?

VSCode is a browser, Visual Studio used to be a browser, and is now native, bravo Microsoft.

Visual Studio was not a browser; on the Mac it was GTK. Now they moved it to Mac native (via Xamarin.Mac).

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