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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

VS code is a snack for Linux and Mac developers. It is intended to lure those people to the Microsoft (and Azure) platform. They are able to do it so well, so quickly because Windows Visual Studio has much of that functionality already in it.

I suspect VSCode, just like NETCore will become their standard. I'm sure they have a path to switchover. They are banking on Azure now, so anything that pulls people to Azure is what they are investing in.

The biggest difference I can see between the Gates/Balmer era and the Nadella era is Gates/Balmer refused to do anything that would in any way endanger their Windows platform. This made them a ton of money for many years, but stole from their future as Linux took over the server side.

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"They are able to do it so well, so quickly because Windows Visual Studio has much of that functionality already in it." I don't believe anything is shared between Visual Studio and VS Code except the branding (Microsoft playing to their traditional strengths in confusing marketing). Where I do agree is that VS Code drew on a lot of the institutional expertise and design learning from the folks who develop Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online. Perhaps also there are shared editor components across VS Code and VS Online, I'm not sure - but again this is _not_ the same editor as Visual Studio's (again with the confusing branding).

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but not on VS, VS Code, VS Online or VS Floor Wax.)

I didn't mean to imply the code was the same or the editor was the same, but that the VSCode team have access to the original source code for all the compiler and intellisense algorithms that were already written, tuned and figured out.

> They are able to do it so well, so quickly because Windows Visual Studio has much of that functionality already in it.

I don't think this is true at all. I don't think VSCode has any Visual Studio code in it at all, but that's probably why they are able to be so nimble with it - no legacy cruft.

I work on VS Code. You are correct; the core VS Code editor does not share code with regular Visual Studio. However many tools and libraries are shared between the two. TypeScript and JavaScript language support for example is powered by the same TypeScript library in both VS and VS Code, and this library also is used by Atom, Sublime, and many other tools.

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