back to article Lightweight VS Code is only getting heftier with addition of official web server extension

Microsoft has released version 1.58 of Visual Studio Code with the ability to open terminals in the editor panel and an official integrated web server extension. VS Code updates monthly but this release is perhaps bigger than usual. Microsoft has made some small tweaks to the Workspace Trust feature that some find intrusive, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Since when has a Microsoft product ever stayed fast and light?

    The kids knew what they signed up for.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well, calling VS Code "LIghtweight" does expose the age range that is using it, that's just a hard fact of age vs. IDE experience (can't really hide from that). But in all honesty, *if* Microsoft hadn't chosen Electron... well VS Code would of been pretty remarkable. I understand Microsoft won't support Java (and never a C/C++ version considering their other products), but they could of taken another route, as they did with Linux support. After all, would they have _HAD_ to use something like QT if they are going to support Linux in such a way? I think if VS Code started dev. today that they wouldn't of used Electron (or hope at least), but sadly the Electron ship has sailed.

      But, I think it's great VS Code is going to have a web server soon. So many of the users just git push everything, so I'm looking forward to seeing things like credentials to AWS accounts in GitHub repos.

      1. karlkarl Silver badge

        I still find it hard to take in that Visual C++ 6 had an IDE that has more C++ related features than VSCode and yet could fit in under 10mb and starts up almost instantly.

        Fair enough, VSCode is built on electron so drags in almost an entire web browser with it but where does the weight come in for a lot of other text editors? Qt is a decent library but a single .dll for that is many times larger than previous generations.

        (g)Vim is pretty good. However you can see some serious weight coming with NeoVim pulling in not only Qt (weird for such a simple interface) but also a heap of other very large libraries.

    2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Microsoft Zune

    3. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Those who don't understand Eclipse are condemned to reinvent it, even more poorly. In Electron.

    4. big_D Silver badge

      VSCode is an Electron application, so it was never lightweight to begin with. It brings hundreds of megabytes of baggage with it. Just look at its memory footprint, compared to Notepad++, for example.

  2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    The capture

    Such server is going to limit people thinking to simple apps that run on such server.

    Big corporations want dumbed down engineers, who are smart enough to code something to specification (with a help of copilot, so they don't steer off to Stack Overflow and by accident learn something) and dumb enough to not think they could start their own product or even worse, ask for the greater chunk of value they produce!

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: The capture

      There's no need to have the web server up.

      I see this like using Flask with python, which has a sandbox webserver for trying stuff.

      But fully deployed Flask sites use gunicorn and nginx or something similar.

  3. cantankerous swineherd

    running a server on your machine sounds like a good way of being owned, unless you disconnect the internet.

    1. chuBb.

      I'd take a noddy webserver any day over a xamp stack running on defaults on a front end devs machine, although really I'd prefer to see it containerised like in the full fat visual studio

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "I'd take a noddy webserver any day over..."

        Why? I don't know exactly what a "xamp" stack is, but I always use a little server on the network for development (I couldn't imagine not to). I'm even using ESP8266/32's when I can, although storage for DB isn't really a thing (but I can write some bytes to EEPROM :-/). If I have to call in a "heavy hitter", that's usually a RPi 3.

        Wouldn't remote config a mail server live (anymore). I've accidentally borked a lot of mail servers from remote, mainly due to "awakeness". Some to the point of needing to use recovery :-/. Do I need a SSH server for mail? Nah, go ahead and disable that one (yep... late nights, late regrets).

        1. chuBb.

          Because for the last 20 years or so running a local webserver is pretty standard thing to do if your doing web dev (much like running code on an emulator before you burn an eprom), save hit refresh, vs save copy to server refresh find colleague has uploaded an old version of a shared file overwriting changes reupload test and find said colleague miffed you borked there bit of work. Also cant really serve anything by file any more thanks to browser security so you really have no choice but to spin up a server of somekind for development work. Plus its portable as it runs on laptop so loss of network connectivity doesnt stop work happening.

          Xamp is a php web dev stack which has some questionable defaults and varies between being a common target and a massive target

          As for the list of things you can run a server on great, i can run a basic http server on an arduino if i want, its just pointless and invalid as an approximation of a prod system, hence my preference for a containerised stack which is indicative of production and is easily locked down to only allow local host access.

          As for disabling SSH sounds like you learnt from your mistake :), although your saying lots makes me wonder......

  4. Abominator

    Bigger bloatware. Its a joke how much resources this thing uses.

    If Steve Jobs were alive, I am sure he would consider Electron like the modern day Flash.

  5. Charles Calthrop

    really, really love VS code. Lots of el regers seem to really hate it, but for my usecase, it is absolutely brilliant.

    1. TimMaher Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Not only that...

      Quite right @charles.

      I used to use Eclipse for BlackBerry dev.

      I use Android Studio (see Idea, below) for Android dev.

      Xcode for Appley stuff.

      IntelliJ Idea for fun and Rust.

      And finally, Netbeans for general Java, J2EE and web page development onto Payara at the server side.

      They each have their own quirks and features.

      Oddly enough, I have installed both Visual Studio and VSCode but only play with them.

  6. Adrian 4
  7. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Lightweight?

    I have tried the Linux version, and gave it a fair go for a few days, as I'm no luddite and wanted to see if it was as good as other people are saying and whether it would make my work more effiicient. It was not a pleasant experience, compared to my working combination of gedit, CMake (for complex stuff) and command line.

    The source code colouring (for C++) was so overenthusiastic that code was a complete brainache to look at. And I couldn't be bothered to spend time trying to go and customise it.

    What really did it for me though was that you are forced to split your command line build statements into a huge blob of JSON, which is difficult if you do anything more trivial than helloWorld, and when you do a build it then just deciphers that JSON back into the command line statement you dismantled in the first place and runs it in a command line terminal! This is spectacularly pointless stuff, creating extra work to redo the work you've already done, and you can't get round having to do it. Compared to my usual working method of using gedit (which does tasteful code colouring) and a command line window where I can press the up key to redo frequently used commands, it was woefully tame wasting. Backing up projects was also painful compared to the simple shell scripts I use.

    For an experienced programmer, it was the same old "being forced into doing stupid stuff im order to use an IDE" experience that I had hopes for it avoiding.

    1. tobs

      Re: Lightweight?

      The C/C++ extension is not great.

      I appreciate that people have put hard work into it... But it feels like it's just a half-hearted port of something from another IDE that already had its own bugs. The community for the extensions doesn't exactly move very fast either, so fixing things is hard.

      On config side though, every IDE does things differently. Provided you're using an JDE at all, there's always some config to be done. At least having it as JSON means it's easy to parse and store.

      I don't understand a lot of the comments here comparing to Eclipse ... My experience of Eclipse is of start up times in the range of several minutes. VSCode is ready to go in a second or two.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Lightweight?

        Well in just this article it says it sports a built-in web server, browser, network traffic snooper, terminals, configurable scrollbars, and some kind of thing which works out if code came from the internet (badly). Hence the comparison with Eclipse.

    2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: Lightweight?

      This is spectacularly pointless stuff

      A sign of lowly paid engineering.

  8. Elledan

    What definition of 'lightweight'?

    Doing a quick google search, it seems that VS Code uses upwards of 700 MB, and a few GB in the more extreme cases. That puts it in the range of e.g. Java-based monstrosities like IntelliJ and Eclipse.

    Meanwhile Notepad++ with a few dozen documents open and a stack of plugins installed is using less than 60 MB for me. That's over ten VS Code instances, apparently. Add a few MB for the mintty terminals and off you go.Ditto with Vim and a few Bash terminals on Linux/BSD.

    VS Code doesn't seem very 'lightweight' to me. What's the appeal here?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What definition of 'lightweight'?

      There should be no appeal to anyone who values their sanity. VS Code's PHP code completion is slow enough for you to forget what you wanted to type before it interrupted you.

      VS Code is utter crap. Even Sublime Text is better and that was overtaken by Atom a while back.

    2. MrReynolds2U

      Re: What definition of 'lightweight'?

      "Meanwhile Notepad++ with a few dozen documents open"

      I seem to have a problem... I have over 100 tabs open in Notepad++ as it kind of works as my TODO list.

      That and anything I pull out but might want again. There are snippets for days.

      1. Boothy

        Re: What definition of 'lightweight'?

        My 'Notes' folder currently has 73 *.txt files in there, with typically around 20-30 open in NP++ at any one time, with common ones pinned to the erm, pinned NP++ icon in the task bar, for quick access.

        Old habits and all!

        I had someone recently suggest I use OneNote, shudder!

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like