Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman The Story of Visual Studio Code with Erich Gamma and Kai Maetzel
Mar 30, 2023
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Overnight Success Took A Decade
- VS Code evolved from a 2011 web-editor effort (Monaco) into a cross-platform desktop product after limited web IDE adoption.
- The team dog-fooded Monaco, built a browser IDE, then pivoted to a desktop app when cross-platform became strategic for Microsoft.
Dogfooding Monaco Led To A Pivot
- The team dog-fooded Monaco and shipped Visual Studio Online Monaco in 2014 but saw only a few thousand users.
- That small adoption pushed them to pivot from a web IDE to a desktop cross-platform approach.
Community Extensions Drove Core Performance Work
- Popular extensions can expose performance problems when they run single-threaded in the extension host.
- Bracket pair colorization forced VS Code to move the algorithm into the core, improving speed up to 10,000x on huge files.