vscode-cpptools VS Bear

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

There are generators for the compilation databases that work with Makefiles and other build systems, like Bear: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

Have you tried Bear? I used it for several projects and overall it works very well.

An update: I am now able to make everything work by generating `compile_commands.json` using compiledb. I'm aware that there is another tool Bear but for some reason it generates an empty `compile_commands.json` file for me.

Try https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

Regarding the libraries, you might need to add it to clangd’s configuration. A convenient way is to have a compile_commands.json in your project (this is generated by some build tools like CMake, but if you don’t use them, have a look at bear).

Note that you need to have a compile_commands.json file. That file can easily be generated by CMake, Meson, etc. For other build systems checkout Bear https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

make a 'gcc' command/executable that do nothing and make it first in your PATH and then run bear with make: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear/issues/219 It is unfortunate that bear doesn't catch the output of the make command with '--dry-run' as it still prints the compile commands, it seems not that hard to support this and I think many ppl would benefit..

You could try to start with Bear: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear In worst cases, I had to use strace to catch every gcc/g++ invocation and restructure the compile_commands.json out of the strace logs.

But it sounds like maybe you’re assuming for the purposes of using something like clangd (highly recommended for coding in cpp projects in general, you want to be using this in vscode or whatever else anyway, codelion notwithstanding I suppose) with neovim on a c++ project that you have to use cmake to produce a compilation database to use with neovim plugins (e.g. clangd via nvim-lsp et. al.). In this case, be aware that the https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear tool is a handy way to just tack it on to whatever command you’re using to run a c++ code build step, and it will give you a compile_commands.json, corresponding to the compiler commands it invoked, on a silver platter.