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Comment by crabmusket | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me that GitLab is adopting a Microsoft product (VS Code) and Microsoft owns a significant competitor in GitHub. Nothing intelligent to say about that other than to wish I'd been a fly on the wall for the discussions about that.

> Next, we asked ourselves the question: Do we want to continue to invest in implementing custom features for the Web IDE that ultimately deliver the same value as those already available in VS Code? Or do we embrace VS Code inside GitLab, and invest in extending the experience to more tightly integrate with GitLab and the DevOps workflow?

I feel like if asking myself those questions I'd have come to the same answer, but it's certainly an interesting position. It's not necessarily that I think Microsoft will leverage this open-source project against GitLab. Maybe it just says something about Microsoft's increasingly-dominant position in developer tooling.

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GitLab PM and author of the OP here.

It is an interesting position we find ourselves in and we had some lively discussions about it! I would like to note, though, that Monaco (which powers our current Web IDE) is ALSO a Microsoft project. So this isn't a change in strategy as it relates to using open source projects maintained by those that may be seen as competitors.

We have faith in the future of VS Code as an open source project but I'll also say that this isn't a one-way door. If things change in the future, we're not so heavily leveraged that we couldn't replace the Web IDE's underlying editor again.

Microsoft may have a dominant position in developer tooling, but they don’t have a monopoly. A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.

The issue is that there’s no money to be made duplicating the effort that has gone into VS Code when VS Code is open source. Even Google doesn’t seem to care about entering that space.

Haven't ever used JetBrains Rider, but I hear they too have remote development capability: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/

Jetbrains just did a deal with gitpod as well: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-jetbrains

Remote development environments are becoming a thing. I've not really had a chance to explore this space a lot but I might.

GitLab team member here - Sid shared a Twitter thread a while ago which has more insights into remote development environments and server runtime. [0]

At GitLab, there are open roles for "Server Runtime" in the incubation engineering team [1] [2] in case someone is interested in joining and building this together :)

[0] https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1400134840754733059

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/#op...

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/all-jobs/

Google is weird, they want to conquer Cloud market but they dont do anything like VSCode or Github in dev community.

In 10 years Google regret not buying Github.

Google had a viable GitHub competitor at one point. But they let it languish and then shut it down. It's a familiar story.

What was that called?

Google Code: https://code.google.com/archive/

Oh. I thought you were talking about a viable GitHub competitor ;)

What made it unviable except letting it languish and then shutting it down?

It had what was essentially an HTML4 UI and just SVN support for what seems like forever. I can't remember a version of it that didn't look like 2005 Gmail.

Hence "languish". When it was first made available in 2006, it wasn't an also-ran.

It was the go-to for hosting small projects for a time, back then.

>In 10 years Google regret not buying Github.

They regretted it the day it was announced.

> A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.

And yet they failed. Remember Atom[1] or Brackets[2]? I'm sure they are still used by a lot of people. But it was interesting to see Microsoft grow VS Code so fast in popularity. My vague notion is that addressing developer pain points early and providing first party plugins for popular ecosystems gave them an edge.

[1] https://github.com/atom [2] https://brackets.io/

As a small anecdote as someone who switched from atom, the killer feature for VS Code is being extendable AND performant. I used to use atom for a flexible text editor, and then still have to use sublime text if I wanted to open a large file (atom choked on multi MB json files).

I don't know if it's possible to get the performance you need to make an IDE/text editor feel snappy in most situations with a pure DOM solution.

Jetbrains seems to do well enough.

> Microsoft may have a dominant position in developer tooling, but they don’t have a monopoly. A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.

I would argue that the best thing to come out of VS Code isn't even "VS Code" the overall environment, it's LSP [0], and MS has given that back to the community such that anybody can use it in a competing editor. I don't really think "VS Code" the product has a "moat" here and (up to now, at least) MS hasn't demonstrated much intent on creating one.

On a personal note I've tried using VS Code many times, but although the features look nice, I find the UI too alien. Luckily, vim has plugins to use LSP, so I can have all of the features I want in my existing editor.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

> I don't really think "VS Code" the product has a "moat" here and (up to now, at least) MS hasn't demonstrated much intent on creating one.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft's moats here are things like Teams, Live Share, and Remote. If anyone has or is working on open source implementations that can be installed into the open source version, I'm sure there would be widespread interest.

Yeah, especially when they could use something like Theia[0], which I believe was built for this kind of purpose? They both still use Monaco under the hood AFAICT. I'd be interested to know if they considered it and decided not to use it for some reason.

0: https://theia-ide.org/

GitLab team member here.

We have considered Theia in the past. Here are a couple of related epics/issues:

- https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1619

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/56812

> Microsoft owns a significant competitor in GitHub.

And Azure DevOps which is competing in the same corporate segment where gitlab might otherwise make some money.

maybe we'll live to see gitlab embrace, extend and extinguish vscode

Github is not a competitor to Gitlab, they offer some similar services but overall it is not the same value proposition

What would you say are their value propositions then?

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