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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft is getting value out of Rust, I hope they add Rust as a supported language in Visual Studio.

I don't know what it's like now, but back in the day devdiv (owners of Visual Studio, .Net, etc.) and Windows were highly siloed and it was hard to get them to align on a common way forward. Rust seems like the sort of thing devdiv would naturally pick up though.

They still are, that is how we got C++/CX replaced with C++/WinRT and to this day zero tooling on Visual Studio, beyond the COM stuff that goes back to COM early days.

Or like UWP was dropped for WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK and there is no designer, or Native AOT doesn't do WinUI (.NET Native and C++/CX were under WinDev umbrella).

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like MS (meaning the “new” MS under Nadella) is more aligned under VS Code than their traditional Visual Studio product.

I don’t doubt that Visual Studio will continue to be developed, but it would surprise me to see MS direct Rust resources specifically to it when they’ve already dedicated a lot of work towards Rust in VS Code.

(This is coming from someone who feels mild resentment at how much better the Rust editing experience is in VS Code than his preferred editors.)

VS is still very much a flagship product for Microsoft.

I didn’t say it wasn’t!

However, if I was MS, I would look at the prevailing winds: it’s good to have one flagship, and even better to have another that doesn’t have the historical (technical, sentimental) baggage of your older one.

> I didn’t say it wasn’t!

Sorry, I got the impression that you felt it was being slowly deprecated in favor of VS Code.

I don't think that's the case, is all.

> but it would surprise me to see MS direct Rust resources specifically to it when they’ve already dedicated a lot of work towards Rust in VS Code.

Embrace, or are we up to Extend?

But seriously, don't MS already have form on the .Net LSP? I can remember the furore but not the details, something about pulling back some VSCode functionality for Visual Studio.

Has Microsoft actually dedicated a lot of work to Rust in vsc? They haven't contributed significantly to the rust-analyzer project, which owns the vsc extension.

> The following companies contributed significantly towards rust-analyzer development: Ferrous Systems Mozilla Embark Studios freiheit.com

https://rust-analyzer.github.io/

I made a quick SDK for an API I built in C#, not too long ago. VSCode was surprisingly a much better experience.

Have you tried it on VS Code? Have found the Rust experience in VS Code to be pretty good.

Rust with rust-analyzer is IMHO very good nowadays, probably on par if not better than the experience with C++ on paid IDEs. The fact Rust grammar is context-free makes writing tools way easier because there's way less room for breakage, unlike when you write an extra > in C++ and parsing burns down in flames.

(Rust’s grammar is technically not context free but the part that’s context sensitive is rarely used and even more rarely at a depth greater than one, so you’re right in spirit but I feel the need to be a bit pedantic about it for fairness’ sake)

(I know, but if you take raw literals out of the equation it more or less is, thankfully you can implement raw literals as a big huge lexer hack and ignore it during parsing. There's also macros, which are a separate pickle, but then the user more or less expects they may cause some magic, sure it's vastly better than `bob<flop>(blaz)` which is not sane in any metric I can think of)

Visual Studio is on its way out, and I say that as someone that uses it professionally every single workday. They've been monkey-patching in features now for years, and it remains slow and bloated.

VSCode is the future and Microsoft's future. The current limited .Net support on VSCode feels like it is intentional to give Visual Studio another few years.

PS - Obviously Visual Studio will never ACTUALLY go away. I am talking about as its flagship product for current/future development, it will remain for things like Windows Forms and other dead-end tech.

I think VS Code is great for "light coding", especially Web development. I find it not so great for large projects. For example, there is no comparison at all between Java in VS Code versus IntelliJ.

It very much depends on how you like to work. If you are very terminal oriented IDEs are actually detrimental to productivity. I'm basically forced to use Rider at work now and I just can't stand it, I hate how it tends to hide critical details on how stuff works.

Visual Studio is very much the same for me, it also tries too hard to make nice what basically boils down to "run shell tasks". I've seen people get accustomed with those fancy features way too often, only to then lose view on how the stuff underlying works and relying on others for support.

VS code is a hodgepodge of plugins badly tied together which constantly spam you with change logs each time you open the app. Hopefully that’s not the future of IDEs and a Visual Studio replacement

Luckily Rider exists

I don't understand how Rider is superior to VSCode. I tried Rider a while ago and switched back to VSCode because it gave me the impression that I was acting as a beta tester. There were, or still are, silly bugs that forced me to reinstall it completely several times. You just can't have such bugs in your software product if its codebase is covered with tests and if there is a dedicated team of software testers. Additionally, it costs $149 for the first year. However, I should note that I'm not a power user, so perhaps Rider's built-in Resharper is actually a must-have feature for someone.

From a solution organization perspective, Visual Studio is still king in the .NET world. I’ve tried matching up my work patterns in VS Code and no matter how I twist it, VS Code always feels like a NodeJS web dev editor.

As for performance, I recently upgraded from an old Yoga 2 (VS became unusable) to the new Surface Laptop 5 and Visual Studio is smoking fast now.

I’ve heard great things about Rider but haven’t tried it.

I don’t see MS dropping Visual Studio any time soon. There are still a lot of us older coders that’d raise hell if they tried.

I also use the free Community version and it has everything I need.

Visual Studio is not going anywhere for Windows developers, or console game developers for that matter.

Even for .NET, what VS4Mac and VSCode can do is a tiny subset of VS capabilities for .NET development.

Naturally you can argue that anything MS, or game consoles are dead-end tech.

My experience with hobbyist C programming in VSCode (with C/C++ extension) is yet to match the experience of hobbyist C++ programming in VS. I'll try out CLion someday.

The biggest issues I noticed are:

- Lack of error indication e.g. used an indeclared variable

- Intellisense meh

There is an intellisense alternative for VS Code called clangd (made by LLVM developers) you might want to try, I use it heavily. You don´t need to use clang as your compiler. It scans my CMake output to perform indexing.

Thanks! Gonna try it out. Does it conflict with the official C/C++ extension?

You need to disable intelligence (there is a popup)

The C/C++ extension actually uses the same underlying engine as VS's C++ IntelliSense. If you're missing things like error indicators then it's likely you just need to configure it a bit more precisely- VS Code has a bunch of ways to do that, but they're all sort of DIY, while VS's is set up out of the box if you're using its project format or CMake support.

As another comment said, try Clangd, it's IMHO superior to intellisense on VSCode and supports anything that can emit `compile_commands.json`files.

Thanks man. TBH I never dug deep into those json files. I need to take a look.

CLion is pretty good! If you like JetBrians IDE's, you'll like CLion.

Thanks, I do! I use Pycharm and Datagrip a lot in my current life, both are excellent.

One of the worst takes I've ever seen on this site

Or it could be that .NET is ok its way out too

Very unlikely. Microsoft’s business clients would scream bloody murder, and much of their own internal products use .net expensively. Azure, Bing, and SharePoint are all built on .net.

But for things like Azure, I’m hopeful to see more node and rust support built in. The interesting part is figuring out which direction Microsoft goes for desktop software. I’m seeing more Electron based applications coming out now.

I very much worry about how invested MS is in .net. After programming in .net for 10 years I'm switching to node. Much to my coworkers dismay.

Why? As asp.net (core) developer who has to use node (nest.js) in my job, I dont think it is any better.

I don't think MS sees a growth for .net at this point

1. Back in .net 6, mere *days* before the final release they yanked a hot reloading feature from the dotnet CLI that is typically used by the massively more popular, but free, VS Code, and making the feature exclusive to flagship VS. To me this spoke of a leadership who didn't care about growing .NET with new developers but only to prop up their old creaky VS $50/mo from their established customer base that is locked in to C# from legacy code. They rolled that mistake back but it was a big warning sign / wake up call for me.

2. Speaking of hot reloading, their much touted hot reloading feature SUCKS. It has nothing on the JS guys. Hot reload is a massive deal. How is Blazor ever going to compete with the JS frameworks with a horrible hot reload story. Not to mention Blazor is way heavier in terms of KB and also is way slower rendering performance to boot. Can you even use tailwindcss with Blazor since the compiler relies on your framework being able to hot reload the css changes?

3. .NET MAUI by all accounts is just a massive disaster at this point.

4. Their latest Teams 2.0 UI rewrite is in *drum roll* react.

I dunno it all just speaks of an underfunded / understaffed group at this point whose top brass doesn't care about them beyond the meager, dwindling, VS pro subscriptions they get from them.

> 4. Their latest Teams 2.0 UI rewrite is in drum roll react.

React is also used for PowerApps UI and even when you can write your own components with PowerApps Component Framework, you can actually leverage platform libraries tor performance if you do it in React: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/virtual-code-comp...

Overall I don't like your comment but I won't downvote because you bring up concerns that matter to YOU :)

Lost interest in NET MAUI without Linux platform support.

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