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Not sure about the c/c++ support, but zed has greatly improved and it's looking like a real long term alternative at this point
Maybe it's just me, but I never got that thing to work right anyway - with VSC. It keeps running amok and using up all the CPU time doing stuff it should not be doing, trying to analyze every single file in my VM every single time it is started.
So... good riddance.
Maybe we need a new movement (or revisit past ideas from the 70s) that focuses on ensuring the openness regarding freedoms of computing (😉) that combat proprietary SaaS offerings? idk.
This is why OSS as an org needs a change IMO. Licenses like SSPLv1, where software can be supplied for free with options that allow a company to make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.
They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.
Does Nano and GCC still work ok?
Only if you are desperate or masochistic.
Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
Jetbrains have gone the opposite direction unfortunately. The latest version of PyCharm came with the announcement that PyCharm Community is being discontinued. Instead, they will provide just one PyCharm (the closed source one) formerly PyCharm Professional, that can operated in a Basic (Free) mode, or a Pro (Licenced) mode. Also, some features that were free in Community edition will be moved to the Pro mode in the new PyCharm.
It doesn't affect me personally because my workplace pays for a pro subscription for me, but I used PyCharm Community for 4 years during uni and I'm sad it's going.
Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/
Rest assured – our commitment to open-source development remains as strong as ever. The Community Edition codebase will stay public on GitHub, and we’ll continue to maintain and update it. We’ll also provide an easy way to build PyCharm from source via GitHub Actions.
PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the "Pro" stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.
Alternatively, you may choose to manually switch to the new PyCharm immediately and keep using everything you have now for free, plus the support for Jupyter notebooks.
So all community functionallities will also be available in the unified edition for free.
Also the Pro license - which you can also get 4 free in like 10 different ways - pricing is extremely fair: A license costs $100-60 for an individual, which is cheaper than most streaming subscriptions...
University students get free pro licenses for jetbrains IDEs I think
Yes you're right, they do. But 10 years ago when I was studying, my university (in Australia) was not on their list of valid academic institutions.
I still have access to my uni email address, and earlier this year I found indeed I could use it to get access to a free Jetbrains student licence.
A few things to point out:
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
Because a .vscode still pollute most open source projects. It"s annoying that they get people hooked on it that could use better tools instead.
Don't be upset it took people a long time to realize Visual Studio Code is fauxpen source, just be glad they're finally realizing it. No need to be condescending and make people feel ashamed over it.
The problem is that they're killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
The problem is that they’re killing competition.
So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says "it's only for us, shoo shoo", and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?
I'm not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else's free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we're having problems.
You're looking at it in isolation, I'm looking at it in terms of this being Microsoft, a company which has held humanity back for most of its existence, now retracting something where they did a decent thing for once.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It's perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn't bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon'ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90's before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist...
I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
One that's worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.
Embrace.
Extend.
~~Extinguish~~. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.
I'd say they can't keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We've past the "Extend" stage now.
It's also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that's not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Microsoft
C/C++ extension
VS Code
so sad 🎤 🎻😢
Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?
That's fuckin' news right there!
More and more engineers wok with cursor.
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
It was explicitly said to not use this outside of VSCode, so, I'm not sure where the surprise comes from.
Good example why you don't want to use and rely on proprietary software (the extension is not 100% open source as I understand), if there are free (as in source code and license) alternatives.
A professor once told me “don’t trust ‘free software’ from a megacorp”, most important thing I learned in college.
If someone is looking for an alternative, use the clangd extension. It’s much better compared to the Microsoft one. LLDB extension is good for debugging. Also works with gdb.
The only things I am lacking now is the one for remote, python.
I am trying to figure out how to get zephyr, platformio, and nrfconnect to work with clangd.
Platformio screams every second because Microsoft's tooling is a dependency.
Zephyr and nrfconnect work for many things, but things like including drivers from zephyr/drivers doesn't autofill which is annoying if you are searching for a driver that might exist in nrfconnect or might not because there are some differences. It also doesn't autofill macros and device tree defines.
If anyone has a good guide on how to set up clangd for zephyr, I would appreciate it!
