Re: [ui-best-practices-working-group] [ide-dev] VS Code

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-09-14, 2:25 PM, "ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Gorkem
Ercan" <ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of gorkem.ercan@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>On 13 Sep 2016, at 16:06, Doug Schaefer wrote:
>
>> OK, gang, it¹s time to start talking about this. I¹d love to hear
>> what people think of Visual Studio Code and it¹s potential as an
>> IDE. Are there things that it does that are better than what we have
>> in the Eclipse IDE? It is technically feasible to go in that same
>> direction? Do we even want to?
>>
>
>VS Code is a coding editor not an IDE. It caters a different workflow
>than IDEs. Yes there are ideas here and there that can be applied to
>Eclipse workflows such as the language server but I think Eclipse should
>continue to improve on its workflow and not borrow a new one.

I¹ve heard this argument before. What¹s an IDE?

As soon as you have integration with a debugger, I consider you an IDE. VS
Code has that.

What features does Eclipse have that makes it an IDE that VS Code would
never have?

>
>> As the Java language server grows and serves VS Code, I wonder how
>> good of a Java IDE it could become.
>
>As a coincidence, We have released the VSCode extension that uses JDT
>based server to marketplace yesterday. As Fred puts ³it is making
>hipsters use eclipse and m2e² [2] :)
>
>[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.java
>[2] https://twitter.com/fbricon/status/775826563992551424

It¹s not a coincidence at all :). That event triggered my curiosity here.
If developers have a great experience working with Java code in VS Code
with Maven, say, and add a debug integration, they become a player in the
Java IDE space. Which would be really cool in my books.

>
>> I am also starting to wonder that about C++ with either a CDT based
>> language server or something built on Clang (which I believe they have
>> already).
>
>C++ language server is something interesting. The current C++ server
>from MSFT is lacking a few important features. I think a CDT based
>server may actually be the answer.

We¹ve long discussed using the clang static analyzer as a replacement of
CDT¹s indexer. The amount of work would be immense and we¹re not sure yet
whether it¹s better anyway. Going the other way and adding the language
server protocol to CDT¹s indexer should be easier and opens the door to
swap it out if we really decide we want to. We¹ll see where the winds take
us.

Doug.
>