Maybe it’s just me, but I never got that thing to work right anyway - with VSC. It keeps running amok and using up all the CPU time doing stuff it should not be doing, trying to analyze every single file in my VM every single time it is started.
So… good riddance.
Does Nano and GCC still work ok?
Only if you are desperate or masochistic.
I would never use nano because vim is right there
A few things to point out:
- Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
- Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
- They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn’t enforce it
- Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
Because a .vscode still pollute most open source projects. It"s annoying that they get people hooked on it that could use better tools instead.
Better tools such as…?
Neovim plus tmux.
nvim
How dare people choose their own software? Don’t they know theyre supposed to let you choose it for them?
The problem is that they’re killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It’s perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn’t bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon’ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90’s before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist…
I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.
You should study about the trustbusting era of early 1900s. Then in the late 70s a new law reinforced antitrust legislation.
The issue is that the pendulum swings fast away from trustbusting and slowly back to it. Trustbusting creates economic development and prosperity, reducing public outcry for it, and capitalists yank the levers of government again towards monopoly building.
You mention the nineties, by even then Netscape successfully challenged Microsoft. But it was too little too late. The pendulum was already swinging back to monopoly, and it’s reaching it’s maximum in our days.
The problem is that they’re killing competition.
So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says “it’s only for us, shoo shoo”, and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?
I’m not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else’s free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we’re having problems.
You’re looking at it in isolation, I’m looking at it in terms of this being Microsoft, a company which has held humanity back for most of its existence, now retracting something where they did a decent thing for once.
Another reason to hate LLMs on the list.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
One that’s worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.
Embrace.
Extend.
Extinguish. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.I’d say they can’t keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We’ve past the “Extend” stage now.
Plus you can always just use clangd. Its what I’ve always used with every text editor that has LSP support.
I wish there was a GCC equivalent; but even if clang is a corpowhore project it’s atleast OSS
Clang is a better C++ compiler than msvc, it generates faster binaries and can compile complex code that msvc errs on at least in my experience YMMV.
Honestly moving to clangd has got to be the single best thing I’ve done in C++, it’s cross platform and I’ve found it to be significantly faster, more reliable, and more featureful than Microsoft’s C++ plugin by a long shot
I havent used vscode in while but I do remember having a lot of issues with the Microsoft C++ plugin, especially in large projects. I switched to clangd very quickly.
Don’t be upset it took people a long time to realize Visual Studio Code is fauxpen source, just be glad they’re finally realizing it. No need to be condescending and make people feel ashamed over it.
I heard Theo talking about this and I think he guessed that they don’t want to maintain these against forks is the number of people raising issues that are not related to the extension and more due to the fork.
His video goes into a lot of good detail as to what’s likely going on.
What Theo also says is that remember that they don’t make any money off of VSCode at all.
It’s also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that’s not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Developers developers developers
Ballmer was definitely one of the CEOs of all time. I’m not convinced cocaine didn’t play a large role in shaping Microsoft.
But Seattle doesn’t do cocaine Remember Microsoft is on the east side
Okay…. Cocaine probably played a large part
Best cocaine in Puget Sound comes from Bellevue, prove me wrong
https://skipvids.com/?v=8fcSviC7cRM (it’s just a frontend to not use YouTube directly)
Lol.
Not an issue. Install Clangd and CodeLLDB. They are much better anyway (see my other comment).
The real golden jewel that Microsoft keeps to itself is the Remote SSH extension. There’s no open source alternative as far as I know.
There’s also Pylance but that only matters if you’re using Python.
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.
I’m not up-to-date: what did they do to the C# extension? I’ve been using it on a personal project and haven’t experienced anything egregiously terrible (yet)
A lot of the C# ecosystem is open source (thank goodness), but the official debugger isn’t, hence it only being available in the proprietary version of VSCode.
They did it with python about 2 years ago.
It was explicitly said to not use this outside of VSCode, so, I’m not sure where the surprise comes from.
It looks like the extension is licensed under MIT https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-cpptools You can “simply” fork it and provide builds yourself, right?
Not the case. There are binary components.
It doesn’t matter though because the Clangd & CodeLLDB extensions completely replace it and are actually waaaaaaay better.
With Microsoft’s C++ extension it always rinsed the CPU - there were files I had to avoid opening because then it would analyse them and I’d have to kill it. The code intelligence also seemed very “heuristic” and was quite slow.
Clangd fixes all of that. It’s fast, doesn’t choke on huge files, and if you have
compile_commands.jsonit’s actually the first properly fast and robust C++ IDE I’ve ever used. You know if you’ve used a Java IDE the code intelligence just works and is fast and reliable. It’s like that.
I think a lot of people would really benefit from learning neovim
Or Helix, it has a less steeper curve
Good example why you don’t want to use and rely on proprietary software (the extension is not 100% open source as I understand), if there are free (as in source code and license) alternatives.
A professor once told me “don’t trust ‘free software’ from a megacorp”, most important thing I learned in college.
Technically this shit isn’t even free (libre); atleast with corpo projects we can always fork them
(…), e.g. via a user-customizable toolbar and how views can be layouted.
I WILL find these people and hurt them. Nobody will blame me.
I hate the way it sounds but, at the same time, it is simpler and more regular.
So is “I runned to the shop and buyed a bottle of milk”.
“Layout” is a noun made from a verb. Just say “how the views can be laid out”. You can’t make a verb out of a noun made from a verb. It makes my brainies ouchie.
Your example doesn’t quite fit the crime. A better example would be. “I ran and catch upped to him.” Or “These clothes are available to be try onned.”
To be fair I once asked an Italian what was the hardest part of English and they said compound verbs, so maybe they’re just not native English.
That’s my charitable explanation anyway. If not I’m joining the hunt!
I think they did a good job of writing a neutral comparison. Based on what it said, I think there’s no reason for me to stop using VS Code right now, but I’ll keep an eye on Theia and reconsider it my needs change.
Microsoft
C/C++ extension
VS Code
so sad 🎤 🎻😢
I started using Lapce. That or Zed just I installed Lapce first. I still use VS Code at work but personal machines I’ve moved on
i’m using zed currently but waiting on the enshittification. i just expect most projects to head that direction these days.
between lapse and zed I also decided on Lapse because it feels much more community-oriented than Zed; maybe you should look into that
An AI company not respecting copyright and licensing? I’m shocked.
holy shit! the thing I’ve been warning developers who promote and use this shitty tool has finally happened.
shockedpikachu.jpeg
if you write fossy software, don’t use products made by fossy enemies.
Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
Jetbrains have gone the opposite direction unfortunately. The latest version of PyCharm came with the announcement that PyCharm Community is being discontinued. Instead, they will provide just one PyCharm (the closed source one) formerly PyCharm Professional, that can operated in a Basic (Free) mode, or a Pro (Licenced) mode. Also, some features that were free in Community edition will be moved to the Pro mode in the new PyCharm.
It doesn’t affect me personally because my workplace pays for a pro subscription for me, but I used PyCharm Community for 4 years during uni and I’m sad it’s going.
Wow, that’s so sad. I loved Pycharm.
Just came across another option. For those getting blocked by MSFT: https://theia-ide.org/
Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/
Rest assured – our commitment to open-source development remains as strong as ever. The Community Edition codebase will stay public on GitHub, and we’ll continue to maintain and update it. We’ll also provide an easy way to build PyCharm from source via GitHub Actions.
PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the “Pro” stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.
Alternatively, you may choose to manually switch to the new PyCharm immediately and keep using everything you have now for free, plus the support for Jupyter notebooks.
So all community functionallities will also be available in the unified edition for free.
Also the Pro license - which you can also get 4 free in like 10 different ways - pricing is extremely fair: A license costs $100-60 for an individual, which is cheaper than most streaming subscriptions…
University students get free pro licenses for jetbrains IDEs I think
Yes you’re right, they do. But 10 years ago when I was studying, my university (in Australia) was not on their list of valid academic institutions.
I still have access to my uni email address, and earlier this year I found indeed I could use it to get access to a free Jetbrains student licence.