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I wonder if this uses pretty much the exact same code as the desktop version. It seems to me that one of the big benefits of using Electron would be to have one codebase deployable as a desktop app and a website with very little change for each deployment.

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It's going to use most of the frontend UI code but all of the NodeJS-specific stuff in the desktop version is a no-go and has to be shimmed or polyfilled to run in the browser. The biggest thing you lose here is system-level access like the ability to run processes--tests, terminals, debugging, etc. And as the blog post mentions unfortunately these things aren't supported yet in vscode.dev.

See https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server which has that design philosophy.

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