As a consequence we regularly discuss features with them that improve the TypeScript coding experience in VS Code. The TypeScript team not only implements the compiler but also the language service that provides support for Intellisense or refactorings in VS Code. We still maintain a very good relationship with the TypeScript team and continue to provide feedback after adopting their latest versions (even beta). TypeScript (initially called “Strada”) started around the same time as we started VS Code, so we became early adopters and were able to provide constant feedback. So, it felt natural that we would use web technologies to build VS Code, to get immediate feedback on how good it is for developing web apps. We started VS Code (initially called “Monaco”) with the goal of building a world-class code editor for web development that runs in the browser. Why did you choose those particular technologies? One major advantage of using standard web APIs for VS Code is that we can provide VS Code as an online component for GitHub Codespaces with almost the identical code base. I feel that going with the standard web APIs gives us the most stable API to work with and does not lock us into a particular, possibly opinionated, tech stack that we constantly have to maintain. We do not, and never did, use any web framework, such as React or Vue.js.

Electron is built on top of Chromium and Node.js, which enables us to use standard web APIs. By using Electron as an application framework we can ship VS Code to macOS, Linux and Windows, including support for ARM-based chips. There is a bit of native code involved too for some of our Node.js modules that we maintain. VS Code was originally written with a mix of JavaScript and TypeScript but we quickly adopted TypeScript for all of our code and immediately got attached to its improved tool support like static type checking and refactoring. Technologies Being Used What technologies are you using to develop it? By then the project was ongoing for around 2 months. I started working on it in October 2011 when I joined Microsoft. Visual Studio Code is a cross platform code editor written in TypeScript based on Code OSS with support for extensions and a wide range of programming languages.

About the App Tell us a little bit about your application: what does it do and when did you start working on it?

Vscode vs vs studio