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Desktops (Apple) Programming Apple

Visual Studio Code Now Runs Natively On M1 Macs (arstechnica.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the natively-supported dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has released a new version of source-code editor Visual Studio Code that runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs like the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models with Apple M1 chips. The change came in Visual Studio Code 1.54 (now 1.54.1, thanks to a bug fix update), which is available as a universal 64-bit binary, as is standard for apps with Apple Silicon support. That said, Microsoft also offers downloads for x86-64 and Arm64 versions specifically, if desired.

There are no differences in features between the two versions, of course. And the non-Apple Silicon version worked just fine on M1 Macs previously via Rosetta, but Microsoft says M1 users can expect a few optimizations with the new binaries: "We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta, and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration." Other key features in Visual Studio Code 1.54 include the ability to retain terminal processes on window reload, performance improvements in the Windows version, product icon themes, improvements when viewing Git history timeline entries, and various accessibility improvements.
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Visual Studio Code Now Runs Natively On M1 Macs More

Visual Studio Code Now Runs Natively On M1 Macs

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  • I don't get the fuss about VSC (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:24AM (#61129726) Homepage

    Depending on your point of view its a feature poor IDE or its a very bloated editor. It seems to straddle both and do neither very well. If you're working in Windows dev why wouldn't you just use the full fat Visual Studio? Ditto if you're developing on a Mac surely you'd just use XCode? As for Linux there are 101 options not to mention vi, emacs etrc.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      If you're comparing Visual Studio Code to Visual Studio then you have fundamentally missed the purpose of Visual Studio Code. If you're using full blow Visual Studio then Visual Studio Code is flat out not designed for you. You're not the target market.

      As for Mac and Linux. Are you suggesting people now sit down and learn 3 different IDEs? Personally I hope they put their spare time to learning how to be better programmers rather than fighting with software.

      • Re:I don't get the fuss about VSC (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:33AM (#61129740) Homepage

        He very obviously wasn't doing that.

        I agree with him. It sucks as an editor (much too busy, visually, and constantly interfering as you type), it's also a poor IDE.

        • Re:I don't get the fuss about VSC (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @07:32AM (#61129902)

          He very obviously wasn't doing that.

          I agree with him. It sucks as an editor (much too busy, visually, and constantly interfering as you type), it's also a poor IDE.

          All due respect, but that is your opinion. I like vim for example, other people hate it. Does that mean vim sucks? I don't like emacs, does that mean emacs sucks? Of course not, they are just preferences. I'd put up with an editor/IDE that I don't like if it meant learning one IDE and being able to release my app on Windows, Linux and MacOS with the minimum of bullshit and then watch my profits grow. One editor on all your deployment platforms is a massive plus.

        • Can't be any worse than xcode. The interface of xcode changes with every version. Try having a problem with a solution that got written for the last version, it will probably be a nightmare.

        • He very obviously wasn't doing that.

          Let me quote the "obvious" to you: "If you're working in Windows dev why wouldn't you just use the full fat Visual Studio?"

          Now tell me in what strange ancient english dialect you don't consider asking the question of why not use full Visual Studio when talking about Visual Studio Code a "comparison"?

          What language do you speak that the OP was obviously doing the exactly opposite of what he was obviously doing?

        • I tried using Visual Studio Code on my Mac for a while, but - at least for me - I didn't see it offered any additional advantages over my usual combo of BBedit plus iTerm (and it certainly was less snappy).

          But admittedly I'm mostly just working in various scripting languages, and any projects are on the smallish side. And any coordination with others is pretty minimal nowadays.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        So who is it for then if not developers who need the facilities of Visual Studio?

        And where did I say learn 3 IDEs? I'm just saying their are tools more suited to mac and linux dev.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by dnaumov ( 453672 )

          So who is it for then if not developers who need the facilities of Visual Studio?

          I am a sysadmin and between the Azure integrations, SSHFS support, YAML linters and Ansible et al find VS Code invaluable.

        • So who is it for then if not developers who need the facilities of Visual Studio?

          Visual Studio Code compared to the full visual studio is like comparing a small independent framework IDE to frigging Eclipse. It's designed for smaller cloud and web app development. It's completely free for a reason. It's a glorified text editor for the learn to code crowd and the millenial web app developers, Arduino hackers, and the nutjobs who learn a new framework every second week.

          And where did I say learn 3 IDEs?

          Well VSCode's most compelling feature is that it's completely cross platform. A good portion of the 101 other options you

          • Well VSCode's most compelling feature is that it's completely cross platform.

            That's not a very compelling feature, tbh. There are plenty of editors that are completely cross platform, but more importantly, are editors so hard to learn that you are afraid to learn another one?

            • That's not a very compelling feature, tbh.

              Speak for yourself. When you don't develop for a the OS you run your IDE on being able to move effortlessly with whatever your home or employer throws at you is highly compelling.

              are editors so hard to learn that you are afraid to learn another one?

              Absolutely not. Now go back and re-read my post. When you're a fantastic coder, have nothing left to learn and you have time to *waste* on something that brings zero benefit then you may be addressing my point.

              • Speak for yourself. When you don't develop for a the OS you run your IDE on being able to move effortlessly with whatever your home or employer throws at you is highly compelling.

                Yeah, I read from this that you are bad at learning/using software.

                The rest of us move effortlessly from editor to editor. It's not hard.

      • Well, "Visual Studio" already means 2 different IDEs on Mac and on Windows, so there you are.

      • You could just use Eclipse or JetBrainsâ(TM) implementation of it. A lot wider support, comes in every language flavor you need and more feature rich than VSCode.

        I personally find VSCode to be too heavy for what it is: a code highlighting text editor, if I wanted that, then I could use cross-platform editors like Brackets which load a lot faster.

    • Re:I don't get the fuss about VSC (Score:5, Informative)

      by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:43AM (#61129758)
      If you're a single-language non-javascript programmer, it's not for you. Otherwise the amount of features is amazing, and you can write your own plugin for anything custom. The debugger works for me in 4 of the 5 languages I use regularly, and that's pretty damn good.

      • If you're a single-language non-javascript programmer, it's not for you.

        I've heard it works with Python, too.

        • I use it all the time for Python and it's great. But if that's your only language there's probably a better alternative.
      • But if you're a multiple-language programmer, you better hope it supports all the ones you need. For example Lisp and Scheme support in VSC is still basically non-existent. At least Atom has SLIMA.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Still better than Eclipse

      • Yeah, at least it's not going to put half a million files on your disk.

        (OK, the half-a-million-files is only in the Android Studio incarnation...)

    • I use it because of the Remote-SSH plugin. I have a Windows desktop and a MacBook but all my development is on Linux (PHP and Python mainly, some C++ and a little Java).

      My desktop and laptop only have VS Code and the Remote-SSH plugin installed. All other plugins are installed on the Linux machine and they use the tools (git, gcc, make, python, php etc) that are already on the Linux machine so no extra software is needed on the desktop and laptop. Intellisense and the debuggers worked with very little confi

      • Oh man, this is a recipe for losing your work. You should figure out a simple deployment strategy and just push local changes like a normal person.

        • I have no idea what you're getting at. It's no different to developing on the machine itself. All projects are in GitHub and that machine has better and more frequent backups than my desktop and laptop.

          • So you're saving everything remotely, and pushing changes remotely, and I guess not pulling locally at all? That sounds... backwards. But if it works for you, great.

            • I don't know why I'm trying to justify my choices. lol. I'll stop after this post.

              For the record, the machine isn't remote in the sense that it's outside my house, only that I'm essentially using my desktop and laptop as a thin client. The Linux box is right next to my desktop. I can just plug in a screen, keyboard and mouse and I'm coding fully locally. It's all just semantics at this point now though. It works for me and I'm not changing it unless I find something better.

              • Ok, it's a weird choice is all. Obviously you're a solo programmer or a hobbyist and you can do whatever works for you. I think that a workflow like this will probably result in pushing changes less often, but again, if the risk is yours alone, who cares.

        • You donâ(TM)t understand what heâ(TM)s doing.

          I also use remote-ssh & remote-wsl to connect to various remote machines and local VM guests. Vscode acts as an ssh client, file browser, text editor, git ui, debugger, log trailer, and more.

          Some of the machines I connect to are half way round the world, and the local echo prediction in the terminal window, I donâ(TM)t have to worry about remote terminal settings or shipping my configs all over the place, and that full-fidelity editing of remot

        • That's not how it works. It's literally running a server on the remote host that the local UI talks to, completely transparently. It's really slick.

    • It's nice to see that the legitimate features to the M1 are getting at least as much attention as Malware options..

    • If you're on a mac your choices for dumb syntax highlighting code editors are not great. I make small programs for simple tasks where the act of making "Solutions" and "Projects" is more mentally draining than the coding. And when I'm not doing that I'm making small changes to someone else's codebase so I really don't want to be imposing any style preferences caused by an emacs configuration nor have to change said configuration. I used to use TextEdit as it was a (bug riddled) cut down BBEdit that containe

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      Ditto if you're developing on a Mac surely you'd just use XCode?

      The last time I did iOS development, I ended up using Xcode paired with VS Code. Despite the fact that Xcode has built-in support for git, I used VS Code mostly to manage git, because Xcode was amazing at creating conflicts within its own files, which it would handle by refusing to work. (You know how keys in hash maps are unordered, meaning the key order can change for a variety of reasons? Apparently Apple's Xcode developers don't, meaning while its internal files are "just text" they tend to randomly cha

  • From what I understand, this is an issue, so getting any amount of real work done on these things will be a struggle until they address that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      From what I understand, this is an issue, so getting any amount of real work done on these things will be a struggle until they address that.

      Well, that makes for a really useless port. I mean, Apple advertises DisplayPort (over USB-C) support on all the M1 Macs. Granted, Apple says only 1 external monitor (at up to 6K) is supported, unofficial testing has revealed far more displays can be driven.

      The M1 Macs however do not support eGPUs over Thunderbolt. But they can certainly drive multiple displays as expe

    • You mean on the M1 laptops right? The M1 Mac mini supports dual monitors and it appears there is a workaround for the laptops.

  • Mod me up, Slashdot (Score:1, Interesting)

    by stonedead ( 2571785 )
    I have come back from the dead after being officially stone dead for 7 years.

  • Congratulations (Score:3)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @07:39AM (#61129920) Journal

    Congratulations to MS! You changed the target and pressed Build.

    • You changed the target and pressed Build

      Have you ever worked for a software company that needs to support multiple architectures? While pressing build is important, there is still likely a lot of testing (and not all automated) that has to happen. Changing to a different architecture often has lots of little problems that aren't so obvious (sometimes revealing existing bugs because the compiler does something just a little differently) and if you don't do a thorough test you will wind up shipping quite buggy software.

      Additionally, they depend upo

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      They didn't even do that. VSCode is an Electron application [electronjs.org], which means it runs on a custom Chromium instance for the UI combined with a custom Node.js implementation. They had to wait for Electron to support M1 before they could. Once it did, in theory, it's just a drop-in replacement: swap out the Intel Electron for the universal Electron and everything should work the same.

      They may also depend on other native code that would need to be checked to work on M1. But the majority of VSCode is just Javascript

  • M1 Silicon (Score:4, Informative)

    by lordsilence ( 682367 ) * on Saturday March 06, 2021 @08:05AM (#61129946) Homepage

    Tons of posts about how Visual Studio Code is or isn't the IDE for you..
    No posts about how amazing the M1 chipset is? Low power and long battery life and still feel snappy?
    I'm a PC guy, I struggle with re-learning the Mac keyboard shortcuts.. but damn if it doesn't feel fast.

    Hopefully the PC industry takes notes. This has enabled me to finally take the step to a fully mobile office without battery fear.

    • Maybe you missed those 10 articles??

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      The funny thing is that VS Code is a javascript app, running on an embedded Chromium. So yes, maybe the underlying Chromium is native to the M1 Mac, but heck no, VS Code is not running natively on M! macs. It's Javascript that is interpreted and JIT compiled.

      • It's pretty interesting how Javascript gets pretty good benchmarks on the M1 though.
        I wonder if VS code uses the built in javascript hardware instructions to improve performance.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

          They use whatever Google Chrome js engine uses. It's pretty damn optimized. I don't know much more.

  • Nothing more needs to be said.

  • It's not like VSCode on the M1 Air was super-pokey before, but the first time I launched the ARM version was ridiculous. 2 windows for 2 large projects, too many tabs, a bunch of extensions, multiple languages, and it was all just there, immediately.

    One note: the self-update did not get me an ARM version. I had to download the ARM specific version.

  • Meanwhile, Emacs abides.

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