> I do have a reason to want to modify this extension.
And it is...? It's a completely honest question, I really like to know what you'd want to achieve and modify but is hidden from you for being in that binary. I'm not interested in the "benefits of open source" but in the specific use cases.
I surely agree that you are limited to the platforms MS is building that binary for, but if you are already using the platform for which they provide the binary, what would you like to change but you can't since it is in the binary and not in the rest of the extension for which there is existing source?
I'm asking as somebody whose job was for many years actually implementing these kinds of software (parsers, compilers, real time parsers for help during editing, etc.). I am really interested in specific use cases, to know if working on the development of some alternative could be justified.
Back in 2016, my team started using the structured binding declaration (C++1z, yes) in our codebase, aka "auto [a, b] = ...".
At the point I was using Qt Creator which had two C++ parsers: a custom one which was very fast but not keeping up with the times and (optionally) a clang-based one. I was using the "custom" parser because it would take 2 minutes to scan a small 10MLOC codebase where the clang one would take almost a day (and still takes multiple hours, and so does the Eclipse CDT parser and others).
That small custom parser would choke on structured binding declarations, and it would recover in the most terrible way possible as it would skip entire functions. Thereby I was starting to lose autocomplete on huge chunks of the codebase.
Now, I have quite a bit of experience on parsers, so it was trivial for me (one weekend) to change the QtCreator one to handle these declarations like (a series of) auto declarations (which it did not do that well, but it was workable). I was able to get another 2 years out of QtCreator with that fix. By then I didn't care.
But this is just my particular example.
I really don't understand why usecases for an opensource IDE would be surprising, specially since this is _developers_ we are talking about, the most likely group of people to feel comfortable editing the IDE to their liking.
And it is...? It's a completely honest question, I really like to know what you'd want to achieve and modify but is hidden from you for being in that binary. I'm not interested in the "benefits of open source" but in the specific use cases.
I surely agree that you are limited to the platforms MS is building that binary for, but if you are already using the platform for which they provide the binary, what would you like to change but you can't since it is in the binary and not in the rest of the extension for which there is existing source?
I'm asking as somebody whose job was for many years actually implementing these kinds of software (parsers, compilers, real time parsers for help during editing, etc.). I am really interested in specific use cases, to know if working on the development of some alternative could be justified.