
Show HN: Visual Studio Code for ARM, submitted to core - headmelted
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pull/24943
======
Lerc
Great to see. I use VS-code on my Arm Chromebook and it makes for a nice on-
the-go dev environment.

Also nice to see ARM getting some attention. Still too many places offer Linux
builds in 32 and 64 bit where It's like the Blues brothers line "we have both
kinds of music here, County _and_ Western"

~~~
zamalek
Out of curiosity, what's the performance of VSCode on ARM compared to X86?

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qeternity
Well, it's Electron...

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popey456963
I swear Electron is incredibly fast in every instance I've used it. Unless
you're doing heavy computation with complex algorithms, it's really nice. I
don't believe VS Code has to do any computationally expensive computations,
and it enables many more people to work on a project (JavaScript being a truly
universal language).

I'm currently working on a Mail application and my benchmark test case is an
email account with 20,000 emails to be displayed. Noting we currently have no
lazy loading and all these are loaded from an on-disk database and put inside
their own Shadow DOM it truly did surprise me when it took just over 400ms for
an entire page load on my development laptop (~3 years old with an i5, nothing
special).

Even if you need to do complex algorithms, just write that particular part in
C and use it in the rest of your JS code like normal.

~~~
gant
Of course electron is fast, it builds on years of work making v8 fast.

My main issue is battery life. I just need to open one electron app (Discord,
Slack, Spotify even though that's CEF, but close enough) to have powertop drop
from 10 hours expected battery life to 3-4.

~~~
popey456963
I'm sorry, what's CEF? I haven't come across that acronym before.

~~~
my123
Chromium Embedded Framework

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nergal
Wow, I haven't tried vs-code until today after I read this post. I'm surprised
how well it works on my mac and it is so far awesome with VIM plugin. I might
actually change from my exVIM environment to this one.

Btw, nice to have ARM support as well :)

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yitchelle
Also just tried it on my Mac as well just a couple of days ago, and was
pleasantly surprise. I am using it to do python and Javascript tom foolery at
the moment and found its support for these two language to be quite good.

There are some quirks that I need to get use to, ie when searching, I had to
click on the left and right arrows to go to the next found items. Intuitively,
it should be the up and down arrow, unless the found item is literally on the
left or right of current position of your cursor.

~~~
nergal
If you are used to vim, the highest rated vim plugin works like a charm with
search etc.

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prophesi
Thanks so much for this, headmelted. I've been using your ARM builds of VS
Code on my Pine64 for quite a while now; glad to see it's finally made its way
to the core.

~~~
headmelted
It's good to know that some folks are getting use out of the builds. Hopefully
the releases can be a bit more consistent once it's in the main repository
(sorry about that!) :-)

How do you find the performance of the Pine64? I looked at it previously and
was interested in getting one, but wasn't sure of how well supported it would
be with drivers etc.

~~~
prophesi
The performance is tolerable on the Pine64. It would run much smoother if it
had better driver support on Linux.

Sadly, I'd only recommend the Pine64 if you're going to run Android on it, or
use it as a server/something to tinker with on Linux.

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DorothySim
Wow, very nice!

I think this comment on issues is also relevant:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1031#issuecomment...](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1031#issuecomment-294782620)

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headmelted
Thanks for the support :-)

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merb
> be to re-implement the Electron API's that Code uses in HTML5 Javascript
> with local storage, such that VS Code could run entirely as a HTML5 web
> application.

This does not look fancy. Microsoft uses VSCode for their online Editor in
Azure and VSS: \- [https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-
Monaco](https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-Monaco)

Or to say it differently, at least the Editor part is working directly inside
the browser: \- [https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-
editor](https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor)

(P.S.: I'm not related to Microsoft, I just tumbled upon while trying to work
with App Services on Azure)

~~~
headmelted
Totally agreed, the Monaco component is already in place and pre-dates VS
Code.

It raises queries about what you do after the editor is running though (i.e.
where does your terminal live? What about your interpreters/compilers?).

It quickly gets to the point of looking at SSH to another box like Cloud9 does
it, at which point you may as well just run Code there and remote to it.

~~~
skybrian
Not really buying it. Sending each keystroke and paint update over the network
isn't a great experience on slow networks; even just ssh has noticeable lag.
(Mosh is designed to fix this, but it's not trusted in most places yet.)

Being able to run the UI locally and using ssh to load/save edits to files
seems like a better way to deal with latency.

~~~
nilliams
Huh? For an editor in the browser you don't send every keystroke and paint
update over the network. The UI is effectively local, you would only need to
send regular network updates for 'autosave', and it wouldn't be to keystroke
granularity.

~~~
skybrian
I meant the part about "may as well just run Code there and remote to it".
Running in the browser reduces latency when it avoids a round trip.

~~~
nilliams
Ah I missed that, sorry.

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brunoluiz
While VS Code will support ARM, paid solutions such as Sublime Text aren't.
This is why I love FOSS.

~~~
bhouston
VS Code is subsidized by Microsoft. Sublime Text is a single guy. FOSS in this
case is a big company copying a single individual and destroying their
business by doing a better job than that single individual.

I'm using VS Code (and I also bought Sublime) but I am a little reserved about
championing FOSS here. Maybe if Sublime had gone open source it might be
different, but then what would his revenue source be?

~~~
gruez
>FOSS in this case is a big company copying a single individual and destroying
their business by doing a better job than that single individual.

That's competition for you. Also, I like how you use the word "copying", as if
the guy was _the_ original creator of the text editor.

~~~
bhouston
Atom and VS Code are copies of the successful Sublime app. Although it may be
more accurate to say that VS Code is a copy of Atom and Atom is a copy of
Sublime.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Which ones copy TextMate and Notepad++ in this scenario?

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sigzero
Textmate yes, Notepad++ not a bit.

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socmag
I adore VS Code and everyone on the team that is cranking it out has my
deepest respect.

It really is a phenomenal piece of work and is just getting better and better.

Looking forward to see how it performs with Chakra Core as the script engine
one of these days.

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jmkni
Nice work mate!

