Visual Studio Code or VS Code, which is Microsoft’s open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment), has become the favourite development environment of developers all over the world. Facebook also has now announced that the same has been adopted as its default development platform.
Google developers utilise the Visual Studio Code extensively and it has been an integral part of the development at Facebook. Considering that, the cross-platform is going to be made the default development environment for the very popular social network.
VS Code is replacing Nuclide as the internal development environment at Facebook. The announcement was made towards the end of 2018. Joel Marcey, the developer advocate at Facebook, has confirmed that in Beta they are making extensive use of VS code.
While Facebook has announced VS Code as its default development platform, according to Marcey, it does not have a specific development environment and there are other IDEs, such as Vim and Emacs, being used as well. By allocating the default status to VS Code, the social media giant seems to be creating a backup for its future.
According to Marcey, “It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and has a robust and well-defined extension API that enables us to continue building the important capabilities required for the large-scale development that is done at the company. Visual Studio Code is a platform we can safely bet our development platform future.”
Marcey adds, “Visual Studio Code is a very popular development tool, with great investment and support from Microsoft and the open-source community.”
Facebook and Microsoft are joining hands to make use of remote development VS Code extensions to enhance the remote-desktop experience with VS Code. Previews of three such extensions were announced in May. These allow development remotely on virtual or physical machines, in containers, and with WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
The purpose of the launch of these extensions by Microsoft was to enable the developers to run the developer tools in the local environment as well as to connect with the services running remotely, as on a virtual machine or a container.
Marcey said, “To help Microsoft enhance its product offering, we have provided input through our experience and expertise supporting remote development for Nuclide. And Microsoft has now created such a robust remoting experience, it has allowed us to move off our own custom solution.”
Facebook writes its code using multiple languages, which include Python, C++, and Java along with its own languages such as Hack, Reason and Flow. Active development has been happening for Flow extension for VS Code since 2015 when it first appeared on the VS marketplace.
