back to article After 15 months in preview, GitHub releases Codespaces – probably the fanciest new shiny since Actions

GitHub's Codespaces, cloud-based development environments that have been in preview since May 2020, are finally here. Prices range from $0.18 to $2.88 per hour. First introduced at the GitHub Satellite virtual event in 2020, Codespaces are perhaps the biggest new feature of GitHub since Actions in 2018. The idea of developing …

  1. Rich 2 Silver badge

    Or….

    “New hires can go from zero to a functioning development environment in less time than it takes to install Slack”

    I can go from zero to a functioning development environment by bringing up a couple of consoles and typing ‘vim’ in one of them :-)

    Ah! Of course!! It’s not shiny shiny though :-)

    1. karlkarl Silver badge

      Re: Or….

      Agreed. It is more like going from zero to 23% of a functioning development environment.

      Excluding decent compilers, what about cscope, ctags, grep, (sp)lint, gdb, doxygen and all those thousands of other tools that you need if you want to attempt some decent engineering. Scripting languages need much of this stuff too.

      Honestly at this point Borland Turbo C++ running in DOSBox is more productive. Perhaps the Indian education system did get that right compared to the west.

      If I ever saw a new hire using this crap, I don't think they would manage to make it through the probation period.

      1. NetBlackOps

        Re: Or….

        I still fire up Turbo C++ for "quick and dirty" jobs.

  2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Confused

    It looks like they are saying you can fetch, edit, and commit code without actually being able to test it first. if that's right I don't want to go anywhere near it for a bunch of reasons.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: Confused

      What probably they mean is that you should work on a feature branch and when you commit, your tests will be scheduled to run on a CI system of your choice. Then probably it is wise to block merging at least until tests are passing.

      However, this is just a behavioural data sink probably to feed the Copilot training.

  3. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Corporate espionage

    Microsoft wants to watch how people work and what they work on. Then likely they are going to feed those behaviours into training models.

    You will be paying for an attempt to get yourself out of business.

    These tools are okay as long as they are self hosted and you are in sole control of the data.

  4. vtcodger Silver badge

    A question or two

    "Mysterious breakage was so common and catastrophic that we'd codified an option for our bootstrap script: --nuke-from-orbit," he claimed. The move to Codespaces was "an opportunity to treat our dev environments much like we do infrastructure — a commodity we can churn." However, the early Codespaces experiments were frustrating since the code for GitHub itself is "almost 13GB"

    It never crossed their mind that there might somehow be some connection between "mysterious breakage" and 13GB of code?

    And while I'm here, what the hell is "churning" development environments or infrastructure about? Are they trying to convert code/infrastructure to butter? Should we wish them luck in that endeavor?

    1. YetAnotherJoeBlow
      Unhappy

      Re: A question or two

      GitHub itself is "almost 13GB"

      Gobsmacked

      1. Will Godfrey Silver badge

        Re: A question or two

        Is that source or final object code?

      2. Dave Schofield

        Re: A question or two

        >GitHub itself is "almost 13GB"

        It might just be *very* well commented.

        1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
          Angel

          Re: A question or two

          Written in a Limerick style?

    2. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Re: A question or two

      “ And while I'm here, what the hell is "churning" development environments or infrastructure about?”

      I think that’s more commonly known as bollocks. Does it make sense now?

      No, not to me either….

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