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Comment by pasta | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get is why they just arent using a stripped down version of Visual Studio for this. But maybe VSC is more like a test product for Microsoft to see how development in Javascript works out.

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Visual Studio's codebase is 20 years old, and it wasn't built with cross-platform support in mind. It uses WPF as the UI toolkit, which is only supported on Windows. Stripping it down would most likely take an order of magnitude more work than just writing a new editor from scratch.

Do you have a source on the usage of WPF? Since it's a really new product compared to Visual Studio itself, I'd be surprised. Anyways, implementing something like a WPF-Gtk shim is not hard, especially for someone as big as Microsoft. The problem, AFAIK, lies in the usage of Windows API.

Core parts of VS's UI (editor, shell) were rewritten in WPF in VS2010, and it's been the default framework for anything newly added or overhauled since then. Some parts of VS still use other UI frameworks though, which makes it even harder to port. (and as you say the UI stuff is just one aspect of VS's very broad Windows API usage).

>Do you have a source on the usage of WPF? Since it's a really new product compared to Visual Studio itself, I'd be surprised.

The parent comment was talking about Visual Studio itself, not VS Code.

Heh, yes and he did understand that as well. I actually had to look up the release dates because of your comment :)

> Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is a graphical subsystem [...] was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0[...].

> .NET Framework 3.0. release date

>> 2006-11-06

> Visual Studio Release Date

>> First entry on Wikipedia is Visual Studio 97 (1997). It was already Version 5 at that point. So even older I guess.

Professionally speaking WPF is still pretty young. Or at least a lot of developers think like that . There is still a lot of Software being maintained in Visual Basic, Windows Forms and whatever previous Frameworks existed. though it is pretty mainstream at this point, so most people just starting with the Microsoft SDKs never touch anything earlier than WPF.

Funny, I thought WPF is at least three years younger. Sadly, there are still schools (at least in Europe) that teach Windows Forms exclusively.

I think the reason this was created was to see if the Monaco editor (the one OneDrive and Azure use to edit files - it's great BTW) in the browser could be put to use to create a general purpose IDE.

Also, stripping down Visual Studio to be cross-platform isn't an easy task.

1. It's WPF and hence depends on Windows only components.

2. It's a lot of C# which covers some assemblies not provided by .NET Core yet.

3. The codebase itself is over 20 years old at this point.

Visual studio is a number of very windows specific COM systems stacked on top of each other. Not to mention that it's a win32 GUI app.

It's not leaving windows. I'm guessing it would be easier to grow vs code into a "full" platform independent IDE than it would be to strip VS into a platform independent VScode equivalent.

VSCode is based upon another project, the Monaco Editor. As best I can tell, it was introduced in late 2013[1]. Creating VSCode on Monaco was probably heavily about reuse at that point since Microsoft specifically wanted an editor for websites anyways.

[1]: http://www.itorian.com/2013/11/visual-studio-online-monaco-e...

That assumes that it is possible to strip down Visual Studio without refactoring to an extent that disturbs the development of the main product and causes more work than just developing VS Code from scratch - and that Visual Studio is portable to other platforms.

I'm not sure if this came from the TypeScript team or if it was just a HN commenter, but I remember reading (a theory) that VSCode is, at least to a degree, meant to eventually become a clean rewrite for Visual Studio, or at least reach some degree of feature parity, and that this is why so much energy is put into this (which strikes me as noteworthy, the amount of energy that is).

I'm not experienced with projects as large as this, but I could see how the work they're doing on VSCode would be worthwhile even if they eventually swap the web-based parts with more performant approaches (as the project expands to 'become' VS).

VS Code also had a huge headstart in that they already had the editor code, as well as the node+chrome workspace (electron/atomshell) to use. Not to mention cross-platform from the start.

At this point, they actually have a lot of the core functionality in place for a full IDE, they just need a prettier means of editing configuration, and creating build-able projects.... It's a bit manual at this point, which makes it a good fit for node and go workflows, and decent for others.

It will get better.

They could use any native GUI toolkit, but then they would not be able to capitalize on the popularity of HTML/CSS/JavaScript for configuration/plugins.

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