I have tried it.

The page says you need to install a compiler. The debugging page says GDB. It doesn't ship with these does it? That's all I'm saying.

Ah, so from my perspective that's not a question of whether it's an IDE or not but whether it bundles third-party code or lets you install it using the standard package manager for your platform. In the Unix world the latter is typically considered a feature, especially for a polyglot editor which supports a number of languages and tools which are all developed by different groups on schedules which are not coordinated.

I'm with you on this one... While the VS Installer has checkbox options for X or Y... a lot is in the box regardless of what you're actually using/targeting.

A lot of the tooling options with VS are getting better month over month even. There's a reason why a fair number of developers for Go, Rust, TypeScript and other languages are absolutely preferring VS Code over other options...

If you use the Remote Containers feature, then it effectively does ship with those. You run the command to set up a C++ dev environment for your project, and it downloads a Docker image from Microsoft's registry that has those tools installed in it, and lets you work and run your code inside that image.

(You do still have to separately install Docker. I guess this is because Docker puts a lot of global state on the machine, so having VSCode try to manage a separate copy of it would cause too many problems.)

Need to play with the Remote Containers feature a bit more... I use WSL remote the vast majority of the time myself, and the SSH remote has been invaluable for a couple of more finicky server setups for my own one-off projects.

The terminal used with VS Code (and Hyper) needs a bit of work though... it gets wonky now and then, good enough most of the time, until it isn't.