They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.
More and more engineers wok with cursor.
Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
Microsoft
C/C++ extension
VS Code
so sad 🎤 🎻😢
A few things to point out:
- Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
- Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
- They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn’t enforce it
- Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
The problem is that they’re killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It’s perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn’t bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon’ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90’s before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist…
I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
One that’s worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.
Embrace.
Extend.
Extinguish. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.I’d say they can’t keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
It’s also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that’s not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Another reason to hate LLMs on the list.
Plus you can always just use clangd. Its what I’ve always used with every text editor that has LSP support.
Clang is a better C++ compiler than msvc, it generates faster binaries and can compile complex code that msvc errs on at least in my experience YMMV.
Honestly moving to clangd has got to be the single best thing I’ve done in C++, it’s cross platform and I’ve found it to be significantly faster, more reliable, and more featureful than Microsoft’s C++ plugin by a long shot
I wish there was a GCC equivalent; but even if clang is a corpowhore project it’s atleast OSS
Good example why you don’t want to use and rely on proprietary software (the extension is not 100% open source as I understand), if there are free (as in source code and license) alternatives.
A professor once told me “don’t trust ‘free software’ from a megacorp”, most important thing I learned in college.
Technically this shit isn’t even free (libre); atleast with corpo projects we can always fork them
Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?
That’s fuckin’ news right there!
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.
I’m not up-to-date: what did they do to the C# extension? I’ve been using it on a personal project and haven’t experienced anything egregiously terrible (yet)
A lot of the C# ecosystem is open source (thank goodness), but the official debugger isn’t, hence it only being available in the proprietary version of VSCode.
They did it with python about 2 years ago.
Developers developers developers
Ballmer was definitely one of the CEOs of all time. I’m not convinced cocaine didn’t play a large role in shaping Microsoft.
But Seattle doesn’t do cocaine Remember Microsoft is on the east side
Okay…. Cocaine probably played a large part
Best cocaine in Puget Sound comes from Bellevue, prove me wrong
Best cocaine in Puget Sound comes from Bellevue, prove me wrong
Challenge accepted, but you provide the samples
https://skipvids.com/?v=8fcSviC7cRM (it’s just a frontend to not use YouTube directly)
Lol.
If someone is looking for an alternative, use the clangd extension. It’s much better compared to the Microsoft one. LLDB extension is good for debugging. Also works with gdb.
The only things I am lacking now is the one for remote, python.
Oooh I’ll give it a try, wasn’t aware of it.
BasedPyright should have you covered on the Python end, the downside is you also need to install the PyPi package.
Have used it and it’s excellent, even has additional features over Pylance
Do you still have refactoring tools with it, like symbol renaming, go to definition, and extract method?
I think so, and it might even be a feature of the upstream Microsoft OSS Pyright, so even that version should(?) have those features available
I think a lot of people would really benefit from learning neovim
Or Helix, it has a less steeper curve
Not an issue. Install Clangd and CodeLLDB. They are much better anyway (see my other comment).
The real golden jewel that Microsoft keeps to itself is the Remote SSH extension. There’s no open source alternative as far as I know.
There’s also Pylance but that only matters if you’re using Python.
It looks like the extension is licensed under MIT https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-cpptools You can “simply” fork it and provide builds yourself, right?
Not the case. There are binary components.
It doesn’t matter though because the Clangd & CodeLLDB extensions completely replace it and are actually waaaaaaay better.
With Microsoft’s C++ extension it always rinsed the CPU - there were files I had to avoid opening because then it would analyse them and I’d have to kill it. The code intelligence also seemed very “heuristic” and was quite slow.
Clangd fixes all of that. It’s fast, doesn’t choke on huge files, and if you have
compile_commands.jsonit’s actually the first properly fast and robust C++ IDE I’ve ever used. You know if you’ve used a Java IDE the code intelligence just works and is fast and reliable. It’s like that.
I started using Lapce. That or Zed just I installed Lapce first. I still use VS Code at work but personal machines I’ve moved on
i’m using zed currently but waiting on the enshittification. i just expect most projects to head that direction these days.
between lapse and zed I also decided on Lapse because it feels much more community-oriented than Zed; maybe you should look into that
(…), e.g. via a user-customizable toolbar and how views can be layouted.
I WILL find these people and hurt them. Nobody will blame me.
I hate the way it sounds but, at the same time, it is simpler and more regular.
So is “I runned to the shop and buyed a bottle of milk”.
“Layout” is a noun made from a verb. Just say “how the views can be laid out”. You can’t make a verb out of a noun made from a verb. It makes my brainies ouchie.
