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Web IDE Beta

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Re: Web IDE Beta

#211

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Rust is pretty much the most important programming language in the world right now. Using it to eliminate entire classes of bugs is a huge win for developers everywhere.

This is a pretty enormous statement. Programming languages are tools and not every tool suits every job. Rust is certainly a "good" language but it will not change the world. In 10 years perhaps we can resume this conversation with some actual substance.

Go changed the world in that it made the rapid development of things like Docker, Kubernetes, possible, along a multitude of other "cloud first" services. This in turn made possible things that were much harder to do before. A single trivial example being the massive NN training pipelines by self-driving companies.

All this could have been done another way, using another language, but not at the same speed as what was enabled by the ergonomy of Go, and not with the same enthusiasm. Arguably, the boiling mix phenomenon made a multitude of things happen and possible, by making them easier to do, thus crossing a required minimum threshold where enough people have the time, desire and ability to achieve something.

Rust will do the same.

It's like catalysts in chemistry. They are not the reagents, but they often make the reaction statistically possible in the first place.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#212

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I’m confused by this comment. Why do they need to move to browser-based JS/TS? Their existing toolchain is all about doing everything in the IDE. (Remote dev envs, code review, all of it). Am I missing something? I haven’t seen anything which suggests they are going down the path you refer to here. A local client they own is their differentiator over the browser, why would they abandon that?

> Am I missing something? Fleet ( https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ ). They're building a distributed IDE. A web-based UI would fit nicely into their new roadmap.

I dunno, most of the stuff in Fleet looks to me like it benefits from being a native thin-client rather than a browser-based app (e.g. SSH to your remotes, run the language server locally, etc).

I can see that a web-UI option could be built atop the "Space-hosted everything" architecture they are putting together, but I don't see any evidence that's actually what their core strategy is, as GP suggested. They spend a bunch of time discussing running things on "Your machine" too, which doesn't sound like a browser-first strategy.

As I see it, their secret sauce is building client-side applications that are faster than other companies can build. I just don't see them giving up that performance edge to make a browser-based client their primary strategy.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#213

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> Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages I don't like these language. I'm forced to write them. I didn't ask for terraform, typescript, CSS, HTML, yaml, xml, JSON, and everything else. > for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better It's never been my experience that a full IDE is better for dynamic interpreted languages. Maybe if you're used to that from writi…

> It's never been my experience that a full IDE is better for dynamic interpreted languages. IntelliJ IDEs are very good at figuring out dynamic languages, but on top of that they also know a lot of tooling and frameworks. So even if you have dynamic Python, but use it in Django, IDEA/PyCharm will be able to give you completions, code navigation, and refactoring just by the virtue of knowing what goes where in Django…

I get that from vscode and pylance/mypy already. I get the same thing with vscode and sorbet for Ruby. Why would I go through all the trouble of using IntelliJ for that?

Re: Web IDE Beta

#214

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> Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages I don't like these language. I'm forced to write them. I didn't ask for terraform, typescript, CSS, HTML, yaml, xml, JSON, and everything else. > for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better It's never been my experience that a full IDE is better for dynamic interpreted languages. Maybe if you're used to that from writi…

Have you ever tried .NET?

I grew up writing VB6 and moved to VS .Net 2003. In college I happily wrote C# in vim.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#215

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I already use mypy with vscode for Python. The type checker is the same one that runs in CI.

Sorry, what happened to `vi`?

I use it when it makes sense. My point is that on the spectrum of IDE text editor, I'd much rather take the text editor than the IDE. The performance and ease of use of a simple text editor vastly dominates whatever convenience(s) the IDE claims to provide. Vscode is my usually my daily driver, as it's fast, has effective built-in refactoring tools, and has a decent plugin ecosystem.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#216

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I gave this an earnest try over the course of a few months. There were notable bugs in nearly all of the extensions I needed to use for work. It's known that Microsoft ships custom builds of the open source portion of VS Code, and there's certainly something missing from the open source core. I ended up going back to hobbled Atom while I wait for projects like Zed to mature.

That doesn't make sense to me as there are next to no changes between VSCodium and VS Code. Unless these extensions were closed source Microsoft-authored?

> That doesn't make sense to me as there are next to no changes between VSCodium and VS Code.

Honest question: How would we know that? Is it possible to somehow diff vscode's code with the open source repo? Is there an analysis available somewhere of the differences?

Re: Web IDE Beta

#217

This looks really great, and nice to see both Github and Gitlab moving in this direction - ability to have IDE in the browser is great for many use-cases. However, I am a bit worried that it looks like most of these companies and up using VSCode. It really needs to have a good competitor in this space, and I hope JetBrains can match that eventually with partnerships of their own.

The way that VS Code is spreading, and the stranglehold Microsoft has on development and direction of the product, give me very strong IE4/5/6 vibes. I really hope some of the open source alternatives that aren't corporation-controlled gain traction over the next year.

There is a difference, and that is that you can use something like Jetbrains and your coworker can use VSCode with issues, but if 99% of people use a browser that renders HTML/CSS differently (and I will argue better than the competition at the time) then you are forced to acquiesce to it.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#218
post #186

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Or maybe Microsoft is done being a bastard. It's a different group of people steering the ship then it was 25 years ago. I know how fun it is to presume they are being exclusively evil but who knows, things can change

If they really liked open source now, they would open-source all their software, or at least all their new software.

open source as a for-profit business is hard. Most for-profits in the space have a closed source commercial product somewhere in the mix. They've got quite a bit open source right now. It's not bad. Compare with Adobe, Oracle, Intuit, Apple, ... not the worst.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#219
post #148
post #143

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Which Visual Studio Code is.

It's not. VSC is a packaged version of the open-source code with proprietary bits added. Integration with the plugin marketplace, telemetry, etc. VSCodium does not have that. In addition, a lot of the good language plugins are proprietary, like PyLance and the C# plugin.

So it's time for the community to step up and write good (or even better) versions of those plugins?

On the one hand sure I wish Microsoft open sourced more, at the same time what they already open sourced is a fantastic foundation for building upon.

Instead of having to write an open source IDE from scratch we can leverage this one and then implement a few plugins for popular languages.

Re: Web IDE Beta

#220
I wish Gitlab would just fix up their existing product instead of increasing the surface area. Every month they put out a security release that often contains a couple of "high severity" bugs and every couple of months there's a "critical" one. And they're not rocket science either, simple auth check bypasses and so on. Clearly something's not going right in the culture if you have multiple critical security bugs every year.

I am increasingly antsy about hosting my private Gitlab instance on the web, and this does not reduce that.

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