I wouldn't lose a second to C# or any MS platform unless required for employment reasons.
I agree. This appears more like an attempt to get the most value (integration of proprietary Visual Studio features that devs want) into the VSCode extension as quickly as possible.
Said proprietary libraries are likely not able to be easily open sourced for a variety of possible reasons, so a closed source LSP bridge was the compromise the teams came to.
It's not without controversy on the Python side as well.
At some point it simply becomes questions of stewardship and transparency: How good are they at pointing out the open source parts wrapped inside the closed source LSP bridge? What cadence do they upstream fixes to the open source parts?
So far Microsoft's stewardship on the Python side seems strong: pylance has a lot of transparent documentation of all the open source bits. There seems to be a steady upstream flow to pyright for users that prefer to stay entirely with an open source LSP. Microsoft isn't treating it like a competition to "win" and encourages users to make their own choice among the options.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't "own" Python in the same way it "owns" .NET so I can definitely understand why there's increased fear that Microsoft won't be as good of a steward with respect to this "competition" with OmniSharp simply because of .NET's past. But in .NET's past this controversy would be happening after Microsoft did all the work in building the closed source LSP replacement. The fact that we're having this discussion now in only an "architectural discussion" state says a lot already about how Microsoft's stewardship and transparency have changed today.
It's slow, it's bloated, it's loaded with way too many configuration options and yet still doesn't have a lot of config I like from other editors. It has plenty of plugins and still manages to be missing extensions that I find important.
Development with Visual Studio just doesn't feel very good compared to other environments these days.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt031819/
This is the rare post where I would be fucking ecstatic to be proven wrong but sadly I believe I'm correct.
It's free for individual developers, small businesses, and work on open source projects (no matter the size of the organisation).
ALso, JetBrains' IDEs are:
- free for students, startups and opensource projects
- cost an insane "two/three beers a month" for individual licenses (yeah, it's more expensive than two beers in many countries, but as a developer I could easily afford it even in the shithole that is Moldova)
So no idea what you're talking about when you talk about "a language that doesn't rely on paying for an IDE".
And the tools for most of the languages supported by the open community? The top, best-of-breed of these tools can barely do the bare minimum of refactoring and maybe symbol lookups. Even to this day you can read things like "X is amazing for refactoring because you change something, and the compiler will tell you all the places where it can't compile".
Good tools are expensive. And, surprisingly, Jetbrains' IDEs are not expensive at all. And are several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything the "open community" has come up with.
And, to re-iterate, no language is dependent on an IDE these days. Go grab Kotlin's CLI compiler, https://kotlinlang.org/docs/command-line.html fire up your vi/emacs/gedit and code to your heart's content if you're so set against commercial IDEs.
> And, surprisingly, Jetbrains' IDEs are not expensive at all. And are several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything the "open community" has come up with.
This says more about the languages and ecosystems you're used to. Try out rust-analyzer and say that again!
This is what you said, in it's entirety: "Maybe it's good to have an open ecosystem for using the language that doesn't rely on paying for an IDE? I personally soured on Kotlin for this same reason!"
And then you go ahead and praise a tool that implements LSP...
Do you realise that "open ecosystem" literally couldn't produce anything of note for any language until the megacorporation you love to hate came along and provided a solution? It wasn't "open ecosystem" that gave you the language server protocol. It was Microsoft that designed it and implemented it for their own VS Code. And the "open ecosystem" that sat on its ass for decades flocked to it and to the protocol like kids to the Pied Piper of Hameln.
And again with "you need paid IDE to develop this and that". No. You don't. There's LSP for C#. There's LSP for Kotlin. You'd know that if you went ahead and looked just slightly beyond your blind hate of commercial IDEs.
> You'd know that if you went ahead and looked just slightly beyond your blind hate of commercial IDEs.
Maybe you missed me saying I use IntelliJ professionally in the previous comment? I'm a happy, paying user of JetBrains IDEs, I've defended them several times on HN myself. I don't hate commercial IDEs; I hate being forced to use them.
It's extremely bizarre that you assume I'm trying to cheap when I'm trying to be principled: I believe the presence of free (as in speech) solutions are essential for me to seriously consider a language. Being tied to a corporation's whims to efficiently use it is ridiculous; I was a happy F# hacker myself until I saw the more recent moves MS has been making. I think what they're doing - replacing omnisharp with a closed source solution and the debacle with trying to make hot reload a paid VS feature being two major, recent issues - show that MS simply cannot be trusted to run a language ecosystem without trying to force its users into behaving as they want them to. There's simply no reason to invest any time into the dotnet ecosystem when there's very comparable languages with comparable performance and ecosystems which don't have this issue.
> And then you go ahead and praise a tool that implements LSP...
What? I'm afraid you've completely lost me here. It doesn't matter that MS came up with LSP, so long as the protocol is open and people can implement and use it without MS's approval. Dozens of editors that have nothing to do with MS implement LSP, the fact that it was made by them is almost incidental.
I tried VS Code and couldn't get used to it. So now I use Rider for C# and Webstorm for JS. Sometimes I open Visual Studio, though:
> There are some custom plugins someone in my org wrote that help accomplish some team-specific tasks > When I need to work on stored procedures in our SQL databases. Rider doesn't know how to parse the schema from the sql project files, instead it wants me to connect to a live database or it will color everything with little red underlines and give me no autocomplete
I think it's nice that my employer is willing to pay for my Jetbrains licenses despite the fact that it is selling a proprietary competitor and also simultaneously pushing an open source alternative. I appreciate it.
VSCode with the C# extension is the preferred C# development environment of corporate shadow IT.
Edit: I love vscode for c#
Sounds like a pretty good reason to me?