As a VSCOde user on both Mac and Windows, I'm not sure they needed to do anything native. Seems like wasted work, when what they've ended up with is plenty fast and looks good in both environments.

I'm not using VSCode to edit one-off files from my terminal. The use case is for your folder-based projects. I generally open it once/week or reboot, etc, and finds it loads, mounts my folder and I'm done in the amount of time it takes me to grab a sip of coffee.

I think too many people base speed because they're used to one-off editing files directly from their filesytem. At this point in time, I only do this when editing config on remote servers and such.

EDIT: I just went and opened VSCode from my terminal and it took about 3.5 seconds to load up an entire React Native project on a three year old 11" MacBook Air.

Yeah, "Visual Studio" is a big, slow, bloated mess, that when working on a typical project, especially web projects will just freeze out regularly and plugins will stop the world, doing who knows what.

VS Code actually loads faster, doesn't freeze as much, and in general runs faster than any IDE I've ever used. And I've used a few. There are faster code editors, but VS Code is a bit more than most of them, but less than a full IDE typically is.

They have done something native...for many, many years. It's called Visual Studio.

VSCode has found a place in my workflow now and I don't care what language or platform they've used. It's proven to be more full-featured than competing editors and they are improving it much faster than other editors (based on my completely non-scientific, possibly biased observations).

Probably to not have to write a cross platform UI library and encourage contributions by using a wildly popular language

> Well, the main question is still "why oh why?". It's not like Microsoft can't afford to pay developers to do something native.

Yeah I do share that question with you and would love an answer from the team!

> Also, calling it Visual Studio is very deceptive. Most devs know VS to mean something completely different.

Could you clarify what you mean with that? Accusing me of being 'deceptive' seems a bit unwarranted and disproportionately antagonistic, considering that as far as I can tell I've made a clear distinction between VSCode and VS (meaning Visual Studio proper), and considering that I can't think of any reason why I would choose to deceive in this matter. Where did I go wrong?

I think the parent didn't mean to accuse you, but Microsoft, for re-using the "Visual Studio" brand in a product so completely different that it deserves a distinct name.

Reminds me of how pissed I was with Amazon calling their line of regular Android tablets "Kindle Fire". I don't know what the sales teams there think, but for customers, the "Kindle" brand was literally synonymous with "that e-ink screen thing".

I'm more pissed about VS for Mac than VS Code... if I were to call out naming something badly.

That's correct, I was talking about Microsoft.

Ah, fair enough. Was confused there for a bit.

The editor "Monaco" was already written... it was for VS Online. They took the already written editor, Electron (Atom Core, etc) from the Atom project (another editor) and grafted the two together. Atom's editor at the time was horribly slow... Electron + Monaco actually worked well.

They've spent the time since then working on actual features... while they'd probably have just barely released anything if they had to do it all in C++, and wouldn't have nearly the depth of extensions they do.