I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
VS Code is a great text editor for me. I write Markdown documents, manipulate bulk strings, and diff files with it. Aside from small scratch projects, its consistency and reliability as an IDE is varied for me. It’s far from “just works”, at least for the types of things I do (C, C++, C#, Rust) and isn’t really on my list of editors I’d recommend for those workloads.
You can make it work, but it’s going to require extensive time spent figuring out what extensions to use (and their quirks), ensure that you have a working setup to the language server, and learn how each environment wants you to setup its tasks and launch configurations, if applicable. Unlike larger IDEs like VS or Rider, it doesn’t have a consistent “new project” process either, so you’re on your own for that.
I wonder what troubles you had with rust in vscode. In my experience. I just install the rust-analyzer extension and it works every time.
Plus some (optional) extension to display the available dependency versions in the Cargo.toml.
Maybe debugging can be a bit tricky, but other than that it’s just installing 1 (or 2) extensions.
It’s exactly that: the trickiness around debugging is the main thing that feels like it’s got some barriers compared to a turnkey solution in an IDE. I heard VS Code and Godot was available until I realized that the LSP and debugger for Godot 4.x was unusable for months until the recent refactor.
Don’t get me wrong though, I am totally using VS Code for my Rust projects. It just isn’t a turnkey solution that I’d recommend to someone if they just want to hit “New project” and do the whole write-compile-debug loop without needing to understand anything. (I had also used it a while back prior to rust-analyzer being the main go-to extension, I think…)