openvsx VS vscode-cpptools

It is incredibly difficult to assess the quality of projects in depth.

I tried doing this for Open-VSX extensions for handling justfile:

https://open-vsx.org/?search=justfile&sortBy=relevance&sortO...

  2.4k nefrob.vscode-just

Why not publish it on https://open-vsx.org for Windsurf and other forks?

For context, Open VSX is run by the Eclipse foundation, which also develops the Eclipse Theia editor, which is basically a clone of VS Code (not a fork, like VS Codium).

The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.

Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.

I was going to point this weird part of their comment too.

Reminder that the Open-VSX extension registry exists: https://open-vsx.org

Idk if they removed the malicious theme (or if they have it at all), but if MS isn't doing anything beyond just responding to user reports, you might as well switch to an open registry that probably does the same level of security work, and avoid giving them yet another monopoly.

https://open-vsx.org/

We also import your extensions automatically (safe guarding against the ones with Microsoft's licensed)

You can also just download in from the vscode marketplace webpage and drag and drop it in

> Microsoft also made its extension marketplace closed-source so we (and Cursor) have to hack our way through it.

For the marketplace, can you not use Open VSX [https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx]?

intelliSenseMode needs to be set appropriately for your platform. This link has a list of platforms where you can set it.

Its close in spirit to DRM. They want to ensure that if you are using their projects, it must be under their terms.

Many of their VS Code extensions[0] have license terms which /prohibit/ them from being used in editors that are not Microsoft's VS Code editor, and Microsoft can issue cease-and-desist for violation of this or use of their extension marketplace in alternative editors.

Microsoft has a pattern they follow where they publish repositories on GitHub to proclaim they are open source, while actually distributing proprietary binary blobs in them that are fundamental core parts of functionality to the codebase[2][3][4]

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/6388#iss...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/5784

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/766

[3] https://devlog.hexops.com/2024/building-the-directx-shader-c...

[4] https://github.com/microsoft/Azure-Kinect-Sensor-SDK/issues/...

The C/C++ extension is open source with MIT license but the shipped extension binary contains MS proprietary binaries that is not as open [1]. I am not sure what will be the difference between using MS official build and compiling the source (there will be some for sure).

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/blob/main/LICEN...

Now if only MS would fix VSCode[0] :'(. Come on, the feature if more than half a decade old and this point.

0: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/6302

🔗 Link to GitHub Issue: Add Similar Function - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/11477

According to this: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/3423 it seems to be at least somewhat possible to reuse natvis files from Visual Studio, but I have not tested that. Never really had the need to look at any non-vector container in the debugger.

Thank you for the feedback! Perf is always an ongoing issue for us but I can say that we’ve recently allocated one of our senior engineers to take on more perf related issues. Something that really helps us out is if you could file reproducible steps that lead to your performance issue. This allows us to address the issues more readily. Please file your issues here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues