VS Code has a growing variety of users in addition to professional developers.
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The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) code editor is only five years old, but the developer tool has gained impressive adoption among the developer population worldwide.
VS Code today has 14 million users, reports Microsoft (according to Statista, there are around 24 million developers worldwide), and gained five million new users over 2020 due to an increasing variety of users in addition to professional developers and the need for remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June last year, Microsoft said VS Code had 11 million users. Its success was built on GitHub, Electron, Chromium, JavaScript and Microsoft’s JavaScript superset, TypeScript.
Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, says the growth in VS Code adoption has come about because people, in addition to professional developers, are increasingly finding the need to use the editor.
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“Traditionally, we only saw professional developers, but we are seeing a really broad set of users – people doing DevOps, people doing IT administration, we see a lot of students using the tools,” Liuson told ZDNet.
As a text editor, people don’t even need to know how to code to use the software. Even some journalists are using VS Code to write stories, according to Liuson.
“VS Code’s strategy is really to support our strategy any, any. You can be a developer working with any programming language, working on any operating system and developing any type of software.”
VS Code runs on macOS, Windows 10 and various Linux distributions, is compatible with Arm64 on Linux and runs on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It is also available as a preview for internal VS Code builds on Apple’s arm-based M1 chips.
Part of VS Code’s popularity is the breadth of the language extensions for C ++, C #, Python and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java and JavaScript / Typescript.
“When we started VS Code, we took this approach where we really wanted to take where there is more demand. We have a very tight integration of VS Code and TypeScript. VS Code is built on TypeScript. But we invest in a lot of language extensions,” said Liuson.
“We have almost two million Python developers using VS Code and well over a million C ++ developers using VS Code. And even our use of Java is approaching a million.”
GitHub, the code-sharing site that Microsoft acquired in 2018, is also central to the company’s open development processes for some products like VS Code, Typescript and some of its rejuvenated retro software like PowerToys.
Liuson also spoke about Microsoft’s internal source approach to software development. The company doubled its internal code in 2019 and recently highlighted its internal code approach as a factor that mitigated the threat from SolarWinds hackers to access its source code.
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Microsoft did not create the term internal code and the approach means taking open source development practices and applying them within a single organization. GitHub and GitHub’s Enterprise Server adapt perfectly to this approach to help organizations collaborate, but in particular.
“Internal source means if you have a private IP, but you are inviting other company teams to collaborate with you. This is the fundamental difference between open source and internal code. Today, it is very common in large companies – there are many silos – but in architecture of microservice you sometimes need to debug a problem, “said Liuson. “It’s when you think about using the open source model within the business context, with the right permissions. For me, it’s not that different from how people collaborate on SharePoint, Word documents or G Suite.”
Liuson says the VS Code feature called Live Share, launched in 2017, is getting a “ton of adoption” because of WFH practices, while Microsoft is investing heavily in IntelliCode, its AI-based code completion feature. IntelliCode is an extension for VS Code and supports code completion for TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Java, C ++, C # and Java.