Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it.

https://github.com/atom/atom

In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.

RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.

(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)

It's not going very well for RethinkDB, sadly: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659

That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence). Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.

I agree but I think Github and Atom are special cases.

A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.

Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.

I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.

I think it already is tbh.

They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.

Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).

Why not games?

https://electronjs.org/apps?category=games

HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.

Edit:

Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.

sad. Atom has much better usable UI. I get constantly lost in VSCode menu and (strange enough) it is very difficult to startup a browser in it.

Someone has to maintain it.

I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)

No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.

Wasn't Electron created for Atom? If so, VSCode is at least using a part of Atom.

That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.

Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.

It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.

I mean, by that argument Windows uses Unix because C was written for Unix.

At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.

VSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.

It's worth noting that the core contributors to Electron are Github employees.

That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.

What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.

Improving Electron can be done far cheaper and easier than acquiring a company.

The only thing GitHub has that Microsoft can't easily get on their own is the user base. That's what this acquisition will be about.

But controlling a leading platform so completely isn't cheap.

They can also ensure the next electronconf isn't cancelled. Everyone wins!

Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...

No, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).

It’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.